Olga Krykun

DOLLS

Gemini Season, Marseille (FR) 04.10-15.11. 2025 (solo)

For the inaugural gallery exhibition in Marseille, Gemini Season is pleased to introduce the solo presentation DOLLS by Olga Krykun. DOLLS is the first exhibition in Gemini Season’s program, marking the beginning of an exciting chapter for the project. This next step embraces many firsts; a new space, a partnership with sissi club, and an opportunity to collaborate on a deeper level with artists while directly engaging with the Marseille art scene. While it’s valuable to appreciate the ‘firsts’, it is also important to note that this exhibition has materialized out of an almost decade-long appreciation for and ongoing collaboration with Olga Krykun and her work.

DOLLS presents ten works on canvas. For Krykun, the exhibition marks an expedition into figuration from her memories of the childhood toys she encountered while growing up around her parent’s souvenir shop in a swiftly globalizing Ukraine, combined with her interest in online communities dedicated to animated television series of the era. Framed only by washes of color, Krykun’s dolls take on a kind of playful and fantastical quality. Partially an embodiment of the early 2000s Shoe Diva aesthetic, which dominated women’s products, specifically stationary cards, and whose themes revolved around a glamorous and aspirational urban single female lifestyle, with a focus on fashion, shopping, and indulgence, the works Larisa, Nara and Lara, Zelina, Olena, and Halyna (all 2025) also function as containers or ‘auras’ for Krykun’s mediation on the fluidity of women’s bodies and roles in the age of the internet. In Souvenirs (02) (2025), a porcelain-like and dollified lamb stares brightly from its saccharine surroundings, having leapt perhaps out of its plastic box and into the unknown. Rather than loyally re-creating specific real-life objects, Krykun’s figures are closer to auto-fictive vessels, containing particular emotions or fragmented images from the artist’s memory. By way of painterly snapshots, the repetition of forms and nuanced facial expressions in Someflowers (05) and Crush (07) (both 2025) reveal the artist’s endeavour to capture and delineate these shifting emotions or states of being by concentrating on certain motifs, in this case bouquets of forget-me-not flowers.

Numerous balloon shapes populate the foreground in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles 1 and 2 (both 2025). The objects, donning smiles, seemingly float in between animate and inanimate, or as the titles suggest, may be symbols for more sinister machines, such as military drones or aerial devices.

Within her practice, Krykun explores and utilizes a variety of mediums, such as site-specific installation, video, performance, and painting. More recently, the artist has put a central focus on working on canvas, using a technique she learned while growing up in 1990s Ukraine. Now, without being obliged to follow the strict rules set out at school, Krykun has honed her skills through experimentation in batik, a process in which she fully soaks the canvas in water before applying acrylic or pastel colors. The result, no longer completely controllable, can be altered in many ways, including rotating the canvas, applying more or less pigment, and exposure to the sun. The tension between the natural processes and reactions, and the artist’s intervention, is an important element in Krykun’s oeuvre. This distinctive technique originated with the artist’s series of e-girl portraits in 2021 (blown-out faces with heavily filtered features and saturated colors) and is utilized in the paintings created for the exhibition.

Exhibition text: Christina Gigliotti