Abstracts series is a limited collection of paintings and watecolours created between 1989 and 1991 shortly before L. Kostenko moved to Western Europe.
Abstract forms have appeared in Kostenko’s paintings long before, first emerging in the Paris series in the 1970s, however, this was the first time they took center stage and became the subject-matter in their own right.
On an artistic level, these are explorations of the basic pictorial principles: the contrast between the light and the dark, the three-dimensional nature of geometric shapes, the fusion of hard and soft lines. At the same time, they are the nexus which bonds the different styles and themes of Kostenko’s work in the preceding years: there are the deep folds of the lustrous curtain of the Mariinsky theatre stage reminding of the role music plays in Kostenko’s work, the trademark pipes of the Centre George Pompidou, which feature prominently in Kostenko’s Paris series from the 1970s and 1980s. One can see the outlines of buildings, the sun, the moon and the far-away planets, colliding together in one space. Hence, references to “Cosmos series”, to “Liquid forms” and to “Space”.
On a social level, these had been painted at the cusp of political, social and environmental changes, not just in Russia but worldwide. “Requiem to Nature” diptych is a reflection on the role of humans in the universe and the web weaved by aspirations of progress, globalisation and industrialisation symbolising abandonment, falling off the edge, death, the end but, ultimately, a new beginning.
