Zvyagintseva engages in various fields of creativity. However, whilst her art practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography, the most representative medium of her expression is drawing, which often transcends the two-dimensional frame and expands into spatial installations. Her drawing, however, is neither based on precise and authentic documenting of the visible world, nor is it based on elaborate mastery, aiming to convey a realistic manifestation of everyday objects, people, or events. Rather, it is a narrative that draws on various selected visual marks and constellations, which are often formless and abstract.

Using the medium of drawing, as well as photography and installation, Zvyagintseva creates images that capture the traces of everyday life, ephemeral coincidences, and what are generally considered the banalities of life. In translating the simple gestures, body movements, and everyday traces left by nameless people into poetic stories, the artist lends a distinctive frame and meaning to the most mundane objects, places, and activities. In other words, the highlighted forms and movements – be it irritating dents in the floor tracing the trajectory of an opening door, ring scratch marks on a door handle, stains on the wall left by someone moving their chair, or black wall “paintings” created by putting out cigarettes – reveal something of the individuals, people we will never meet or get to know. In this way, man’s unconscious movements or the contours of objects used in daily routines become part of the artist’s individualised narrative.

For her Ljubljana show, Zvyagintseva combines drawings created by appropriating doodles – the kind one usually makes on a piece of paper when buying a pen – with tiny sculptures whose shapes are parts of various objects and spaces from the immediate surroundings of her residence in Ljubljana. Combining the found and seemingly out-of-use material discarded by strangers with parts of objects she encountered in her temporary living quarters, she manages to fuse two abstract forms into an autobiographical narrative full of coincidences and uncontrolled gestures as well as carefully selected and documented details of her daily life.