NK Gallery is pleased to announce Oksana Mas’s first solo exhibition in Belgium. The arresting sculptures and paintings featured in Gravity + Glass, like all of Mas’s work, are fascinated not only with the world we can see but also with the invisible forces that shape it.

At the heart of Gravity + Glass are monumental engines that the artist has transformed into weighty objects of dislocating power and brutal beauty. As part of an ongoing series entitled Quantum Prayer, molten Murano glass has been poured dramatically over the dense metal of otherwise pristine motors. The clash of textures and material -- of mechanized steel (alienated from its utilitarian function) and fragile glass (more often associated with the making of refined chandeliers) -- locates these works at an exhilarating crossroads of influence and imagination. Drawing inspiration equally from contemporary manufacturing culture as well as from the ancient past of the Venetian island of Murano, whose glassmaking industry dates back 14 centuries, Mas has crafted unexpectedly poignant emblems for our eclectic world -- at once delicate and hard-edged. By merging the priorities of Pop Art and folk art, Mas has reinvented the possibilities of the conceptual readymade.

Works from Quantum Prayer are complemented in Gravity + Glass by sculptures drawn from another continuing series: Heart Transplant. Here, the hulking engines that form the basis of Mas’s transformative imagination have been cloaked surreally in leather skin. The result is a luxurious exaltation of the underlying apparatus and a destruction of its practical function. Described by the artist as constituting “the fetishized heart of our civilization”, the display of these dense steel contraptions is invigorated by the echo of heartbeats throughout the gallery. These eerie acoustic throbs are curiously claustrophobic and invest the assembled sculptures and surrounding paintings with a strange sense of uninterrupted pulse -- as though the observer is inside the work or the work is inside the observer. 

Born and educated in the Ukraine, Oksana Mas is a creative visionary whose work spans sculpture, installation, architectural design, painting, drawing, and photography. Fascinated with questions of science and religion, her work blurs the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, relational art and neo-expressionism, biomorphism and digital art. She is the founder and artistic mastermind behind ArtTogether, a global interactive art project of monumental scale. In 2012 Mas won the Independent Critics Prize at the 65th Locarno International Film Festival. A year earlier, she exhibited in the Collateral Events program of the 55th Venice Biennale as a follow-up to the display of her work “Post–vs-Proto-Renaissance” at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Other recent solo exhibitions include “Die Geshtalt” in Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2012), “Helium-3” in Aidan Gallery, Moscow (2010), “Retrospective” Casamor’s Foundation, the Museo Dali and in the Rambla de Figueras, Figueras, Spain (2010), “MAS” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2008), “Hired to Dream” in Aidan Gallery, Moscow (2007), and “Epidermis’s phenomenon” in Karas Gallery, Kiev (2005).