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Kitchen Party
Anna Choutova
27 Mar - 25 Apr
PV: 26 Mar, 6-9pm
Miłość is proud to present Kitchen Party, the debut solo exhibition of London–Cyprus based artist Anna Choutova, founder of the artist platform Bad Art Presents. The exhibition is both a comeback and a retreat: a premature retrospective of an artist who never expected to be the centre of her own show.
Kitchen Party draws together paintings, drawings, and sculptures detailing her life, the irony being much of her life looking very far from being a party, one often shaped by isolation, addiction, best friendships and obsessive rituals. Repetition —cigarettes, spaghetti, supermarket browsing, driving up and down the motorway—becomes both coping mechanism and creative method.
The exhibition captures late-night conversations, collapsing routines, private humour, and the moments that quietly shape a life, analysing behaviours that can both function as a trusty anchor or as a rock tied to your ankle as you are thrown into a lake. Kitchen Party examines the uneasy relationship between self-exposure and solitude, the pitfalls of building a practice and a persona through self-deprecation, and between celebrating your work and devaluing it. Wanting to be the gallery but wanting everyone else to be the show.
Paying tribute to her Russian-Armenian heritage, she nods to the kitchen as a place of transgressive thought and unmonitored conversation. The exhibition frames the kitchen as a site of after-hours exchange, intimacy, and informality. She points to her basement flat down the road from the gallery. Her Soviet inheritance reverberates through her vision of the West, which she exists in and observes with a slightly raised eyebrow beneath her rose-tinted frames. Now, she’s done her time at the kitchen at parties.
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
Anna Choutova is a visual artist and curator based in London. She is currently the Research Fellow at the Slade School of Art and the founder of curatorial platform Bad Art Presents.
Anna’s practice is best described as a browse through a forgotten section of a Duty Free store. She fixates on items that glitter but ain’t gold, researching their societal significance and cultural connotations. She is fascinated by the things we consume in an effort to alter our identity. Her work often comments on the power of food and food culture, especially its destructive elements.
Anna dissects her various obsessions, whether it be a cigarette or a snack, through repetition and geometry.
She is an Eastern-European immigrant who was brought up in the west, in the midst of the red paranoia on one end and the western rose-tinted fetishisation on the other. Anna’s practice lays somewhere in between, approaching pop and plentiful with soviet greyness. She has put herself between Malevich and McCarthy and is on a mission to marry destitute bleakness with inconceivable excess in her own practice.
Anna Choutova
£35
Selected press mentions:
Overstandard
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
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