Katia Margolis - artist
Katia Margolis was born in Moscow in 1973. She is an artist, writer, translator, illustrator, graphic designer and teacher.
Katia Margolis graduated in linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanties in Moscow. She later studied linguistics at the University of Padova. She also studied and taught at the University of Melbourne where she was an Australian Government Doctoral Fellow. In Venice she collaborates with Ca’ Foscari University, the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Venezia, La Casa delle Parole, and the Venice Biennale. She also taught at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice where she served as artist-in-residence in 2012.
Katia Margolis has lived and worked in Venice since 2004.
Her paintings and installations have been regularly exhibited in Venice and abroad.. There are examples of her work in collections throughout Europe, Asia and the USA.
She works in a broad variety of media: including painting in oil, tempera, acrylic and watercolour, collages, experimental and mixed techniques, etching and printmaking (both traditional and innovative) on paper, silk etc, illustration and book design, glass sculpture and art glass design and installation.
In her art Katia employs the inner characteristics of the materials she uses. Her work in glass belongs in an innovative tradition of collaboration between contemporary artists and leading Venetian glass masters.
Her art feature predominantly Venetian imagery in both semi figurative and abstract forms, and investigate the interplay of love, loss, memory and eternity.
She also explores the same themes in her literary work. Her first book, Footprints on Water (Sledy na Vode) that was published to critical acclaim in May 2015 by Limbakh of St Petersburg and received a prestigious literary prize NOS (2016).
Her book Venezia: Quarantene Chronicles (2020) has been fully illustrated by the author
Katia Margolis also devised and illustrated the book Quaderni Veneziani: Joseph Brodsky and Others, an intricate exploration of underlying themes and references in Brodsky’s Venetian masterpiece, Watermark.
Together with the children patients of the oncological paediatric hospital she also illustrated a children’s book by Brodsky, The Ballad of the Little Tugboat , published by Pink Giraffe of Moscow. It formed the centrepiece of a national award-winning project, The Art of the Book, presented in New York in 2010. All sale proceeds were donated to “Grant Life!” in London and Moscow, a foundation set up for the benefit of children suffering from cancer. For more than ten years she has curated a series of annual exhibitions in major Russian museums devoted to art created by these young cancer patients.
In addition to her work with “Grant life!”, Katia Margolis has devised and delivered several art projects for children over the
years. There include the “Bambiennale” children’s art courses in Venice, culminating in an exhibition that coincided with the Venice Biennale.
Katia’s recent hand-made artist’s book Unwritten Book was published as facsimile edition by Centro Grafica (Venezia) in signed 50 copies
Katia Margolis has published numerous articles and essays on the arts and literature, as well as translations of Italian, Russian, English and Polish prose and poetry.
Katia is also an artist turned political activist and a popular blogger, vigorously opposing the Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and takes an active part in programs helping Ukraine and strongly advocates revisiting and decolonisation of Russian culture, participating in conferences, meetings and forums, publishing articles and releasing interviews. She is a regular contributor to Radio Liberty/Free Europe.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
WIND FROM THE SEA , galleria Vert-de-Venise, Venezia, 2024
THE BIRTH OF VENICE, galleria Magazzino, palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venezia, 2024
POINT DE PERTURBATION , LGallerie, Paris, 2023
ACQUA ALTRA , Galleria ItinerArte, Venezia, 2023
INTERIOR LIGHT, Galleria ItinerArte, Venezia, 2023
VERT- ORANGE (con Roxana Kenjeeva)( Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venezia, 2023
UNPACKING, galleria Magazzino, Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venezia, Dec 2021
CAMMINARE PER LE ACQUE, Venice Fashion Week, Partecipante invitato, Edmond de Venise Boutique, October 2021
Dante e Akhmatova : se tu detteresti a Dante (con Livio Ceschin) , Museo Anna Akhmatova San Pietroburgo, Russia (catalogo), 2019
PORTE REGALI, associazione Settima Stanza, chiostro Chiesa Sant’Elena, Venezia, 2018
ICONOSTASIS (catalogo), galleria Magazzino, palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venezia, 2016
NON E’ QUI: sette passi verso la luce / HE IS NOT HERE: seven steps towards light/(installazione site-specific, fotografia, grafica Chiesa dei Carmini, Venezia in concomitanza con la 55ma Biennale di Venezia), 2013
PARABOLE (pittura, grafica, fotografia), mostra personale, Galleria S.Eufemia, Venezia (catalogo), 2012
SNOWMARKS/WATERMARKS (installazione, grafica, oggetti, pittura, fotografia), Palazzo Zenobio per L’Arte, Venezia (catalogo), 2011
TRITTICI SEMIOTICI (fotografia, pittura), mostra personale, Galleria S.Eufemia, Venezia, 2011
SLEDY NA VODE/СЛЕДЫ НА СНЕГУ (installazione, grafica, oggetti), dedicata a 70 anni di Joseph Brodskij, Museo Anna Akhmatova San Pietroburgo, Russia (catalogo), 2010
WALK-IN-PROGRESS (pittura), mostra personale, Galleria S.Eufemia, Venezia (catalogo),
SAMIZDAT O SEMIOTICO (installazione site-specific, S.MARCO 2939, VENEZIA), 2009
ICONE QUOTIDIANE (Spazioeventi-Libreria MONDADORI, Con GALLERIA “IN PARADISO”,
GIARDINI DELLA BIENNALE) (progetto dedicato al 50° anniversario della pubblicazione in Italia del romanzo Il dottor Živago di Boris Pasternak), 2007
COSE DI DAČA , presentazione del progetto (VENEZIA, PALAZZO CA’ BERNARDO,
UNIVERSITÀ CA’ FOSCARI ), 2007
RUSSIAN REFLECTIONS, Washington Dc, RUSSIAN CULTURAL CENTER, USA, 2006
MUSEO OKUDŽAVA, Mosca, Museo Statale della Letteratura, 2002
MUSEO ČUKOVSKIJ, Peredelkino-Mosca, Museo Statale della Letteratura, 2001
CENTRO STUDI ITALIANI, Mosca, Università Statale degli Studi Umanistici della Russia, 2000
Kata Margolis has participated in many collective exhibitions
By Katia Margolis ...
“… We see, of course, not with our eyes alone. Not only with our eyes.
A boat rocks gently, marking the pulse of time. It creaks, almost imperceptibly. The sun is sifted through a veil of haze. Two pigeons wander beneath the slope of a roof. Draw your hand along the wall: salty terracotta crumbles under your fingers. Taste it. A light wind moves through your hair.
Or otherwise. A ray of sunset falls across a plank table. A smooth apple nestles against its neighbor. A vase of blue glass, holding last year’s dried flowers gathered on one of the far islands of the Lagoon, casts an evening shadow. The carmine curve of the apple glimmers faintly with ultramarine. And it seems the cicadas of last summer are crackling once more. And the unhurried, glowing sun-apple sinks behind the sharp tip of the bell tower… Everything will return. Everything will be.
Or this way. Snowflakes melt on the tips of your fingers. Snow crunches beneath your feet. A crow bursts noisily from a branch. On the slope, among bushes bent beneath the weight of white words, someone’s tracks coil and wind. A human? A beast? A rider? An artist?
And again winter embraces us with the piercing whiteness of unwritten watercolors. The whisper of paper-snow. The soft rasp of the brush. And, unnoticed, spring arrives, and something blossoms on the page that has never existed before—something at once obedient to the eye and disobedient to the hand.
The art of seeing (saper vedere) was named a distinct discipline as early as Leonardo da Vinci. To see the old and the familiar with new eyes. To walk well-known paths as if they had never been walked. To remember what was forgotten, to discover what is new, to recognize what once was, to glimpse beyond the horizon of the future. To uncover the artist within oneself and to learn not only technique, but the art of seeing—and of giving form to what is seen.”
in 2026
I'm teaching an art retreat with Anna Kwiecinska
in Venice in October 2026.
contact Anna on whats app +94 75 660 7713