Errata Corrige #2234, 2013, vintage book, inks, nails on wood panel.

In a new show at Rome’s Sara Zarin Gallery, the Russian-born artist Ekaterina Panikanova presents work composed of old books, which she arranges into a kind of jigsaw puzzle of palimpsests. (We’ve featured her on the Dailybefore.) “Paper, cards, and books have a fundamental value in my work,” she says. “I see them as a body of rules, dogmas, traditions, religious beliefs, and scientific discoveries, which, right or wrong for their time, human beings had put in cages.”

“Crepuscoli (Twilight)” is on display through February 7. When Panikanova looks at “the rules of the home [and] education,” she’s said, she sees only “eventual imprisonment.” Accordingly, in this new show she hangs her spreads in a spare room furnished with a spartan table, an uninviting couch, and pairs of shoes, among other housewifely touches. The ersatz domestic setting makes her work seem freighted with fatalism, and imagery that could be twee—cakes, rabbits, antlers—instead appears deeply troubled. I say that, of course, as a compliment. 

You can see more of Panikanova’s work at Colossal.

Installation view

Pars particularis, 2014, books, wood, nails, ink, acrylic.

Box n°88, 2014.