MARINA CHISTY
FRAGMENTS OF NOW
OVERVIEW
Russian-born and New York-based artist Marina Chisty turned to abstract work after starting with figurative work. Chisty’s work focuses on working with pigment powder, acrylic, and charcoal. Everything about this is intentional. Chisty seeks to demonstrate transformation, tension, displacement, and unpredictability reminiscent of landscapes. In her solo exhibition Fragments of Now, viewers are challenged to embrace the instability found in liminal space between the artist’s and the material’s work. Each piece is a response to what the pigments produce. This is because of her theoretical evolution. When Chisty first started, she created figurative work with the collections Female Faces and Introspective Impressions Collection. In these collections, she stressed the importance that each speck of paint brings to the whole.
She continued her journey in Fragments of Now. This is her in-depth exploration into abstraction and New Materialism, but it keeps the same psychological intensity found throughout her collections. That psychological intensity comes from the slight, barely visible – in fact, sometimes hidden – transitions. These transformations are common to all humans. A Collection seeks to put these shifts into language, reminding the viewer their connection to the environment changes them. Is it successful in communicating? Yes.
ORGANIZED BY
Isabell Sliwinski, Executive Director
Abigail Bruno, Director of Curatorial Affairs
Isabelle Grace Brett, Deputy Curator, International Art
Katrina Anderson, Curatorial Assistant
GRATITUDE
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GALLERY
CATALOG
Explore the artist's biography, words, and collections
CURATOR'S STATEMENT
CONTACT
MARINA CHISTY
My practice centers on transformation—not only of materials, but of how change, continuity, and belonging are experienced through the lens of being a person in a constantly shifting world. There’s a tendency to believe certain things are stable—identity, environment, even the ground beneath one’s feet. Yet everything is in flux, shifting gradually like erosion or rupturing without warning. My work embraces instability, creating space for uncertainty rather than resisting it.
Water and pigment are not just tools but collaborators. They move unpredictably, dispersing and settling in ways that can’t be entirely controlled. At the beginning of each painting, control is relinquished, allowing the materials to behave freely. Only later comes intervention—a response to what has taken shape. This process mirrors how landscapes are formed—not through singular dramatic events, but through the accumulation of subtle, often imperceptible changes over time.
Painting holds a fundamental paradox: it captures movement while ultimately becoming still. My work engages with that tension. The resulting forms inhabit a liminal space between the personal and the universal—recalling patterns of erosion, geological formations, or cellular structures at both macro and micro scales. From afar, they suggest vast shifts in terrain; up close, the intricate interactions of pigment and water reveal the agency of the materials themselves.