Elena Bulycheva

Elena Bulycheva’s practice is grounded in an expanded understanding of painting through the radical act of washing. Positioned at the intersection of feminist theory, performative materiality, and the history of shaped canvas painting, the research explores the transformation of painting via destruction, care, and domestic labor. It interrogates the hierarchy of form, the invisibility of reproductive work.

Drawing on references including Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art, Frank Stella’s investigations of the shaped canvas, and Gotthard Graubner’s explorations of softness and the body of painting.

Through studio-based experiments - washing canvases in household machines and expanding the conventional frame of painting into shaped canvases and soft sculptures—the research addresses the historical misrecognition of female painting. At the same time, it seeks new paths of abstraction through the use of spray and graffiti techniques, rethinking abstraction and reconfiguring the form of the canvas. Ultimately, it aims to propose new possibilities for painting as a site of feminist critique, material transformation.