Masha Luch (V. 2)
Masha Luch is primarily a printmaker who also works with video art, sculpture, and installations. With a previous background in fashion design, Masha turned her attention to becoming a conceptual artist after completing her graduate studies. She has exhibited across Europe and recent exhibitions include venues such as triple showings at Kafedra Gallery in Berlin and Herceg Novi, Montenegro, IMPRIENT in London, dual shows at PostScriptum Projects in Mišići and Podgorica, Montenegro, Lendoc Gallery in Saint Petersburg, and the Biennial of Youth '23 in Belgrade. Masha’s publications include Suboart Magazine, VerbumPress, TATLIN Publishing house, and a previous critical essay by Aedra Fine Arts.
The silkscreen prints typically explore themes such as hypersexuality, domination, innocence, and playfulness with colorful compositions and precise linear forms. Masha often experiments with the use of text in her work through various mediums including printmaking. The texts reveal ironic dichotomies such as pointing out thoughtful contradictions. Her ‘monologue’ series of text incorporates the lenticular printing technique which changes visual perception through optical illusions, changing words on the art depending on where the viewer stands. Masha’s figurative silkprints has the viewer question physical actions and their ironic purpose, such as a woman grasping herself out from a vase instead of flowers or a monochromatic line across a woman’s neck implying a collar and leash.
Conceptually, the works often push boundaries on traditional values as Masha breaks taboos on sexual tension or displays a sense of quirkiness through the depiction of personal objects changing functional form. Clean and crisp, the work often uses pop-art-like qualities, not as a representation of popular media culture, but through a vehicle of presenting her subjects through a puristic essence of form. Such a focus turns attention towards the concept rather than application. The figures depicted in the works have a cartoonish presentation through flat color forms but with a naturalistic and precise outline, conveying a highly stylized standard in a manner similar to ancient Egyptian murals, but with Western standards of anatomical form.
Reflection (pictured above) remains one of Masha’s most peculiar pieces. The print depicts an arm extending out and holding a hand mirror to the floor. Puzzling and ironic, the mirror apparatus seems to have the glass fallen out which becomes depicted by a blue elliptical form on the floor, however the circle appears too big to fit inside the handheld mirror. Perhaps the circle on the ground is not glass but a reflection of what remains outside the composition or maybe the mirror acts as a magnifying glass, reflecting light onto the floor. Just changing the functional form of the mirror with a lack of clarity Masha forces the viewer to reflect on the silkprint’s mysterious purpose, concept, and meaning.
Masha Luch provides the viewer with an environment which questions personal as well as societal values and perceptions. Through heightened awareness, she uses figures and personal objects as props to reveal psychological impulses and concepts which instill a sense of bewilderment. A thoroughly provocative, sensual, and mysterious artist, Masha Luch confronts the viewer to question concepts, illusions, and utility. With a solid portfolio and knack for humor, irony, and applying confusion towards her audience, Masha can be described as an avant-garde artist searching for boundaries to bend, push, and break.
