Margarita Gluzberg spent her childhood years in Communist Russia before coming to England as an émigré. She is fascinated by Western consumer culture: the lust for buying that drives and sustain our capitalist society and the way in which consumerism influences almost every sphere of human relations. Her upcoming solo show at Paradiso Row in London, Avenue des Gobelins, presents a new series of works entitled The Consumystic and takes as its subject the allure of London shop fronts, meditating on mystical nature of material desire and consumption.

Over recent months, Gluzburg has taken black and white photographs of luxury shops as seen through their windows from the street. Using traditional 35mm film then double and triple-exposing the negative, her works are glamorous distillations of contemporary consumerism; ‘black magic abstractions’, in the words of the artist, that seek to replicate the trance-like seductions of the shops’ beckoning interiors.

The show’s title, Avenue des Gobelins, is borrowed from a series of photographs Eugene Atget took of Parisian shop fronts in 1927. Gluzberg’s black and white images adopt the analogue photographic techniques of the Surrealists to produce a mesh of consumer signs and spaces: the black gleaming lacquer of Chanel, designer handbags, shimmering lights and logos are multiplied in stylish overload through the windows’ reflections and the superimposition of images within single photographs.

Gluzberg’s art makes use of a great range of media, incorporating painting, drawing, performance and sound installation as well as photography, so as to ensure that ideas are perfectly matched to their means of expression. The Consumystic presents its images in two formats: as an 80-image carousel loop slide projection and as platinum prints.

The slides are projected onto paper powdered with graphite, effecting a luminosity caused by their surface being simultaneously light reflective and absorbent, and their mysterious, fleeting existence mimics the elusive nature of the allure they describe. Fixed permanently also as platinum images — the printing method offering the greatest tonal range of any chemical process and closely resembling the slide projections onto graphite — are themselves objects of luxury, covetable like the contents which they depict.

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Paradise Row
Margarita Gluzberg