Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov | Collecting the City

Exhibition duration: May 4th - 25th, 2012 
Opening reception: Friday, May 4th |  8 pm
Exhibition Hours: Mon - Fri, 2.30-8.30 pm; Sat 2-6 pm

Beton7 is proud to present the latest exhibition of Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov which creates a visual dialogue between Berlin and Athens. The artists are identical twins, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, now living and working in Berlin. They work collaboratively and consider their works to be conversations. The installation Collecting the City deals with the archaeology of the modern metropolis. At first, it looks like a “bagatelle’’ of everyday life having as a protagonist the street car which is artistically explored and viewed from new angles.

A construction sight is created inside the gallery with both images brought from Germany and elements sight specific to Athens. The piece is blending boarders between inside and outside spaces, hand-made and found objects. Black and white large-scale wall images of two illusionistic modern trams made of layers of transparent fabric are combined with actual materials, such as sand, stone and metal. Tram cables create a complicated net on the gallery ceiling.
Trams glide almost effortlessly through Berlin. Their geometric and at the same time organic form and elegant movement are dance like, whereas their cable lines form a delicate drawing on the sky. But trams are also mirrors; they mirror the city through their large windows and have identical front and back views. 

Series of diptychs, oil painting miniatures on transparent paper, accompany the installation. They originate in three prime images: modern trams based on snapshots taken in the city, historical trams inspired by old documentaries and the sky, intersected by tram cable lines. Black and white images are juxtaposed with colour paintings, realistic moments are combined with almost abstract ones. Pedestrian, flaneur view of the city will hopefully invite the viewers to make their own discoveries of hidden stories and take notice of their personal way through the city.

The artists suggest historical reference to the streetcar of the 19th century and it's reemergence in a contemporary metropolis. This earliest form of public transportation was abolished during the middle of the 20th century, whereas nowadays, following the ecological concerns of urban planning, this “timeless’’ and graceful vehicle is coming back in a festive atmosphere.

Curator: Charis Hadjinicolaou, art historian


The twins Maria & Natalia Petschatnikov (*1973, St. Petersburg) work as an artist duo in the border region between painting and installation. Their works give us a glimpse into how the world must look to two people whose lives are intimately connected.
The Petschatnikovs choose to focus on seemingly insignificant phenomena that are part of our daily lives. With imagination and wit, they manage to tease out new and surprisingly profound perspectives on the everyday world; they find the extraordinary within the ordinary. Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov are not sociologists, their methods are not those of documentarians, their motives not those of field researchers. Rather, they look for their motifs as they stroll through the city and collect, and the photographs they take while doing so become the basis for the painterly or sculptural engagement with the objects.
It seems that these calculatedly focused images and installation-like stages achieve associative spaces thanks to the disparity of their media. A narrative level thus comes into being, and spaces open up that want to be filled with one’s own stories, memories, and ideas. The Petschatnikovs also emphatically invite the viewer to make connections between their various projects, as between the various media that they utilize. Maria & Natalia Petschatnikov live and work in Berlin.