In a time marked by distance and, at the same time, an intense need for intimacy, Anna Zvyagintseva’s show Warm–Cool turns to the bodily experience of contact—both accidental and necessary, fragile yet decisive. What happens at the moment of encounter? How does the body hold its trace, and how does this memory continue to shape us?
The artist’s works register real, physically recognizable interactions while avoiding direct figuration. Zvyagintseva shifts the focus from the image of the body to the space between bodies—the threshold where contact becomes visible. This boundary is never fixed. It moves between approach and withdrawal, warmth and cold, care and intrusion. In this unstable zone, vulnerability appears, and the memory of the encounter takes form.
Attentive to small gestures, hesitation, and fragile states, the artist allows space for error and uncertainty. Within this fragility lies the possibility of unexpected closeness—forms of intimacy that resist clear definition. The exhibition space itself becomes a system of carefully measured distances, where presence is sensed without direct touch.
These reflections are closely connected to the artist’s experience of motherhood. After the birth of her first child, physical touch takes on a wider meaning for Zvyagintseva—as a language of care, solidarity, and shared responsibility. It does not guarantee safety, but calls for attentiveness and sustained involvement.
The exhibition brings together works created over the last ten years, between the birth of the first child and the expectation of the second. This period is marked by heightened sensitivity, when life is felt at once as tension and tenderness. Warm–Cool moves beyond a formal painterly device to become a way of thinking about contemporary experience—contradictory and unstable, yet oriented toward relation.
Today, as bodily experience is once again shaped by vulnerability, closeness appears not as something given, but as a conscious gesture—one that requires attention, effort, and choice.