Courtesy of the Artist. Photography by Brynley Odu Davies.
Miłość is proud to present Kitchen Party, the debut solo exhibition of London–Cyprus based artist Anna Choutova, founder of the artist platform Bad Art Presents. The exhibition is both a comeback and a retreat: a premature retrospective of an artist who never expected to be the centre of her own show.
Kitchen Party draws together paintings, drawings, and sculptures detailing her life, the irony being much of her life looking very far from being a party, one often shaped by isolation, addiction, best friendships and obsessive rituals. Repetition —cigarettes, spaghetti, supermarket browsing, driving up and down the motorway—becomes both coping mechanism and creative method.
The exhibition captures late-night conversations, collapsing routines, private humour, and the moments that quietly shape a life, analysing behaviours that can both function as a trusty anchor or as a rock tied to your ankle as you are thrown into a lake. Kitchen Party examines the uneasy relationship between self-exposure and solitude, the pitfalls of building a persona and a practice through self-deprecation, and between celebrating your work and devaluing it. Wanting to be the gallery but wanting everyone else to be the show.
Paying tribute to her Russian-Armenian heritage, she nods to the kitchen as a place of transgressive thought and unmonitored conversation. The exhibition frames the kitchen as a site of after-hours exchange, intimacy, and informality. She points to her basement flat down the road from the gallery. Her Soviet inheritance reverberates through her vision of the West, which she exists in and observes with a slightly raised eyebrow beneath her rose-tinted frames. Now, she’s done her time at the kitchen at parties.