TITAN CONTEMPORARY
A monthly spotlight on a notable artist. Start date 7/9/2025.
T I T A N V O I C E
MASHA LUCH
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 Titan Contemporary.
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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.
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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 (top right) 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.
The work deals with concepts of sensuality, confusion, and expressing the human body, often with minimalistic or pop art and design qualities. Masha’s silkscreen prints usually contain luminosity but with fixed solid outlines of the subject filled with monochromatic areas defining various forms. There remains a unique elegance to representing human parts to convey concepts or notions. Some of the pieces are playful such as conveying the human eye as the sun, spraying red light upon the sea while others like display subtle eroticism with a luminous hand barely touching the top lip of an upside down woman.
Masha’s installation pieces reflect more towards a state of confusion unlike her direct prints. Dream 346 was an installation captured on film of ice molded in the words of "мечта", or “dream” in Russian, the performance lasted 3 hours and 46 minutes as the video captures the icy words slowly melting over the duration. Masha reflects on the state of consciousness, are dreams even real if they leave without a trace...just like the ice? We do not remember most dreams, as they are swiftly forgotten, and are usually not documented. How many instances, deeds, and actions go unnoticed within our lives? Perhaps dreams are just the start of the conversation.
Another installation work such as 10 Go Back to Start reflects the disarray of losing, or in the process of defeat, as the dice on the floor indicates 10 dots facing up with a board instructing the viewer to start from the beginning. Do we even want to play this game if we start off by losing? The state of confusion the installation imposes on the viewer as if asking “is it worth trying if we begin with failure”.
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Masha Luch remains a powerful artist and a thorough communicator who leads us into a journey through our senses, desires, and anxieties. Her varied approach to transmitting elegant, unornamented imagery guides the audience to respect art from an altered perspective of our surroundings. The art accompanies playfulness without being superficial or layered in excess, riveting our senses to conjure upon contemporary paragons.
