CARDBOARD
SPACE as Matter
For Tatiana Zaytseva, space is not an empty background or neutral container—it is the primary subject of artistic investigation. Her sculptural works are not placed in space; they are constructed with it, shaped through it, and exist always in relation to it. Whether expanding outward or balancing on the edge of collapse, her forms never isolate themselves from their surroundings. They breathe with the space around them. They listen to it. They depend on it.
The medium—cardboard, salvaged and recomposed—is not the starting point but a tool: a way to test how space can become matter. Each sculpture becomes a question: What happens when space thickens? When it resists? When it remembers? When it moves? This is why the project unfolds across a shifting framework—Space as Matter, Matter as Movement, ...Matter as Life, ...Matter as Thought. Each phrase becomes a lens, revealing a different condition of form and presence.
What unites these works is not a singular formal language, but a shifting network of relationships: between material and gesture, surface and tension, idea and fragility. In Zaytseva’s sculptures, cardboard is never just a material—it becomes expressive tissue: like muscle that holds form, a trace that carries memory, a signal that communicates presence, a breath that gives rhythm. And yet, before all else, it is space that activates the work. Space initiates the dialogue—it surrounds, defines, and gives meaning to the form.
Matter as MOVEMENT
In her solo exhibition Space as Matter, Matter as Movement, Tatiana Zaytseva reimagines some of the most iconic sculptures in Western art history—not as static monuments, but as evolving structures in dialogue with space, time, and the viewer. Each work in the series revisits a canonical form, from The Winged Victory of Samothrace to Giacometti’s Walking Man and Judd’s Untitled (Stack), not to replicate the past, but to question what it means in the present.
Space, in this series, is not background—it is the active, generative force that gives shape to matter. These sculptures do not exist in space; they exist with it. The viewer is not outside the work, but implicated in its unfolding. Movement is not dynamic in a traditional sense; it occurs through perception, attention, relation. The body of the spectator completes the form.
Cardboard—folded, layered, fastened—replaces the permanence of bronze, marble, or steel. Its fragility is not a limitation but a proposition: that sculpture today can be attentive rather than assertive, intimate rather than monumental. Through this material, Zaytseva introduces new meanings into familiar forms, weaving together art history, contemporary thought, ecological urgency, and personal gesture.
Space as Matter, Matter as Movement is not a reconstruction of the past, but a sculptural thinking-through of presence, vulnerability, and how form might still carry meaning in a world of shifting structures.
"Tatiana Zaytseva: Spase as Matter, Matter as Movement" solo exhibition. April 2025, Miami, USA.
NIKA
after Pythokritos, The Winged Victory of Samothrace
Tatiana Zaytseva’s reinterpretation of The Winged Victory of Samothrace transforms the classical symbol of triumph into an exploration of space, fragility, and material intelligence. Built entirely from cardboard and without any internal structure, the sculpture is held together by the tension, layering, and orientation of its own components. It is hollow, weightless, and permeable—its form shaped not by mass, but by the way space flows through it.
For Zaytseva, the absence of the head and arms is not a loss but a gesture toward space itself becoming an active element—presence born through voids, movement formed by absence. Through cardboard, a material of transience, she proposes a new kind of monument—one defined not by permanence, but by movement, impermanence, and the logic of connection.
Two thousand years separate these works—and between them, a shift in how we understand victory. Once carved in stone, triumph now must be assembled, held, risked. NIKA is no longer a symbol of conquest, but a structure of vulnerability: a quiet insistence built from impermanence, coherence, and care.
CONTINUITY IN SPACE
after Umberto Boccioni,
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
In Tatiana Zaytseva’s work, a key figure of Futurism acquires a new resonance. In 1913, Umberto Boccioni created an image of a heroic stride into the future—powerful, dynamic, almost mechanical. A century later, that stride becomes something else. Zaytseva’s cardboard figure retains its forward momentum, but its movement no longer represents the triumph of speed. It unfolds through friction, interruption, and resistance. The material bends, breaks, responds to every effort. Instead of smooth assurance—vulnerability and focus; instead of metallic gleam—traces of labor and fragility.
The sculpture is covered with exposed corrugated cardboard—left visible and emphasized, like a rhythmic structure registering internal tension. The figure no longer walks through space but seems to move with it, constantly in dialogue with its surroundings. Space here is not a background but active matter: resisting, supporting, shaping.
Between the early 20th and 21st centuries lies a deep conceptual rift. Then—faith in technological progress, expansion, the will to remake the world. Now—attention to matter, a dialogue with space, the experience of resistance. From the ideal of force—to a vulnerable, yet resilient, form of being.
WALKING MAN
after Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I
In this work, Tatiana Zaytseva reimagines Giacometti’s figure as an image of human existence in its most stripped-down state. Walking Man is not about motion in the physical sense, but about the inner effort to remain in being. His step is not dynamic—it is survival, a quiet insistence on going forward through invisible resistance. The cardboard body seems to thin out into space, leaving only the trace of presence, a silhouette on the verge of disappearance. Space penetrates the form, shaping its tension from within. This is not a path toward a destination, but a state of being—caught between step and stillness, matter and void. Within this figure lives silence, vulnerability, and the deep human not yet.
BIRD IN SPACE
after Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space
In this sculpture, Brancusi’s vision of flight is reimagined not as transcendence from matter, but as an act of concentrated effort—restrained, persistent, and grounded. The inner structure is made from standard packaging cardboard, while the surface is covered with hundreds of fine segments, carefully cut from a Louis Vuitton shopping box. Luxury here is not declared—it is deconstructed, repurposed, reduced to a gesture.
The upward motion of the original is preserved, but the illusion of purity is set aside. This is not flight as liberation, but as labor—a rise that happens within the world, through resistance and connection. Space is not passive; it becomes an active field. The line moves through it, shaped by its tension, supported by its presence. Movement emerges from matter—not as a statement, but as a process of becoming.
Just as Brancusi sought essence through reduction, Zaytseva’s bird seeks it through exposure—through the honesty of material, the trace of the hand, and the quiet accumulation of form. This is not escape, but a different kind of flight: a gesture of being.
STACK
after Donald Judd, Untitled (Stack)
Tatiana Zaytseva’s reinterpretation of Donald Judd’s Untitled (Stack) retains the logic of structure while undoing the illusion of permanence. Her stacked forms follow Judd’s rhythm—regular intervals, clean vertical alignment—but the material tells another story. Cardboard replaces aluminum. The elements sag slightly, flex at the edges, and reveal traces of assembly. Precision gives way to presence. What remains is not fabrication, but proposition.
In this version, Zaytseva pushes minimalist form into a dialogue with the readymade. The boxes are standardized, mass-produced, ordered online. Their arrangement recalls the discipline of Judd, but their banality gestures toward Duchamp. Somewhere between those two poles, the work questions not only what form means, but what authorship means. Is this an object, an artwork, a citation, or a quiet act of irony?
The work unfolds through conceptual tension: between repetition and variation, authority and humility, structure and impermanence. By inserting cardboard into a vocabulary once defined by steel and precision, Zaytseva reclaims the vertical stack not as monument, but as question. It is a work less about material than about meaning—about what we inherit, what we standardize, and how we choose to build meaning from what’s already given.
DEUX EX BOX
after Roman Bust
This work marks the origin of Tatiana Zaytseva’s sculptural turn—a playful yet pointed reinterpretation of the classical Roman bust, rendered in recycled cardboard. The title, Deux ex Box, winks at the divine interventions of antiquity while grounding its own presence in the mundane realities of packaging tape, barcodes, and shipping labels. The result is both homage and undoing.
What was once carved in marble is now assembled from refuse. Yet the form persists—recognizable, composed, even dignified. The drapery folds echo classical rhythm, while the fragmented surface tells a different story: a body no longer eternal, but provisional, worn, and handled. Zaytseva’s figure is as much about what is absent—the missing head and arms—as what remains. It stands not as a monument, but as a question.
This work initiates a shift: from stone to skin, from permanence to process, from ideal to artifact. In its very fragility, Deux ex Box becomes a meditation on memory, cultural inheritance, and the paradox of materials—how something built from the discarded can still carry the weight of history. In the end, it is not about mocking the past, but about reclaiming its forms for a present that knows decay, irony, and reinvention.
SPACE as Matter
Matter as LIFE
In this sculptural series, Tatiana Zaytseva continues her ongoing exploration of space—not as void, backdrop, or container, but as an active substance, a generative field from which form arises. If in earlier works matter was seen as movement, tension, or thought, here it becomes something even more fundamental: life itself.
Each sculpture is constructed from salvaged cardboard—marked, creased, stapled, and visibly handled. The material is humble, transient, and industrial. And yet, through Zaytseva’s process, it begins to resemble living structures: a fish, a coral, a branch, perhaps even a lung or a root. These are not copies of nature, but resonances—artificial forms animated by natural logic. What was meant to wrap, protect, and be thrown away is now rising, extending, adapting, reaching.
Space, in these works, is not empty. It breathes with the sculpture. It enters the folds, wraps the absences, and holds each figure in quiet suspension. The forms do not impose themselves—they persist. Their life is not heroic but attentive. They do not assert power; they absorb time. They carry the tension between what is lost and what remains possible.
In Space as Matter, Matter as Life, the sculptural gesture becomes one of care: assembling what has been discarded, shaping presence from absence, and reimagining fragility not as lack, but as the foundation of all that grows.
THE FISH
Within the sculptural series Space as Matter, Matter as Life, The Fish emerges as a quiet yet insistent form—abstract, incomplete, and immediately recognizable. Composed of torn, bent, and reassembled fragments of cardboard, it evokes the shape of a fish, yet withholds its full outline. A single visible eye and the suggestion of a body invite the viewer to complete the image through attention and imagination. This is not a finished object, but an open gesture—a form suspended between presence and possibility.
The sculpture is made entirely from discarded packaging, marked with shipping labels, barcodes, and traces of transit. These remnants are not hidden, but embraced. Space enters the form through gaps, edges, and absences, becoming part of its structure. The fish does not swim through space—it is shaped by it. Matter here is not inert; it holds memory, tension, and the potential for life.
This work inhabits the fragile threshold between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the industrial. It asks: what remains alive in what we discard? The Fish transforms waste into a vital structure, revealing that even what is overlooked can still carry breath, direction, and meaning.
BRANCH/REACH
In this vertical, branching form, natural growth and human residue converge. Built from salvaged cardboard—marked with shipping labels and barcodes—Branch / Reach evokes coral, a tree, or a reaching hand. Its identity remains suspended between living system and symbolic gesture. The sculpture does not imitate nature—it reflects its logic: layered, adaptive, open to interruption.
Within the context of Space as Matter, Matter as Life, this work explores how form emerges not despite vulnerability, but through it. The structure stands tall yet remains porous. It rises from the ground, not in rigid strength, but through subtle curves, flexion, and balance. Movement here is quiet but insistent—space flows through the form, shaping it from within.
Like The Fish, this piece asks what kind of life can persist in the aftermath of use. What still rises, when value has been stripped away? In Zaytseva’s hands, cardboard is no longer packaging—it becomes presence. Branch / Reach is not only a sculptural form, but a proposition: that even what is fragmented and forgotten may still reach toward light.