Artist Talk: Marina Fedorova on her Cosmodreams project

There are artists whose practice is inseparable from the way they live. Marina Fedorova is one of them. Represented by Sputnik Gallery since its founding, she is a figurative painter whose works are held in the collections of the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum. Nominated for the Kandinsky Prize and exhibited across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, she has spent years building a body of work with a single consistent centre of gravity: the studio.

“My Home Is Where My Studio Is”.- Marina Fedorova

The phrase is not a romantic shorthand. It describes a deliberate architecture of life. Canvases at every sta

ge of completion, brushes arranged by use rather than order, light entering at angles she has learned to read like a second language. Nothing decorative, everything in service of the work.

Fedorova trained at the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, where technical discipline met a deep engagement with material culture. That grounding is still visible today: in the slow layering of oil paint, the careful preparation of surfaces, the insistence on craft as the foundation of even the most conceptually ambitious work.

Beside the studio stands her library. For Fedorova, the two spaces form one working environment. “I have always believed that books are companions to art, each one carrying a universe within its pages,” she says. Literary influence enters her practice directly: “Sometimes, the inspiration for a painting begins not with an image, but with a line I’ve read, a story that lingers, or the memory of a book I once carried with me on a journey.”

This matters when looking at Cosmodreams. The project, in development since 2017, moves across ecology, cosmology, cultural mythology, and the future of human civilization. That thematic range is not the product of visual research alone. It comes from a painter who reads widely and thinks in long arcs.

What defines Fedorova’s practice is not scale, though her canvases are large and her exhibitions immersive, but a sustained sense of purpose. Her work addresses climate change, the acceleration of AI, the uncertain coexistence of humans and machines, the legacy we leave to future generations. These are the themes that have shaped her work for over ten years.

“By sharing my favourite corners studio and library, I hope to reveal the warmth and authenticity behind my practice,” she reflects. “These spaces are not grand or distant; they are part of my everyday life. And it is here, in the quiet dialogue between paint and paper, between brushstrokes and words, that my works truly begin.”

Marina Fedorova is represented by Sputnik Gallery.