Olga Sabko's work is a reflection on the nature of time and the difficulty of its apprehension. Raising the question of time invariably sends man back to his own finitude and to the unsurpassable framework of his linear existence. This apprehension of the infinite is not done without vertigo. "Man is a point lost between two infinities", says Pascal. Refusing to engage in a frontal ontological reflection, Olga prefers to approach her subject through the physical marks that it leaves. It is for her an indeterminate and fluid element within which events occur. Her sculptural work is as much an attempt to give form to time and its content as it is a means of formalizing her physical and emotional relationship to it, as well as to the space that is analogous to it.
Uncertainty is paramount in Olga Sabko's work. Her work does not pretend to be exact and she discharges her sculptures of any responsibility. Suggesting an impression of perpetual movement, the forms that are given to see are not definitive. They are the expression of a constant movement through several visual and sensitive dimensions, testimonies of a physical existence in an uncertain space-time.
"The forms are not confident about themselves," she says. "They are closer to a first state of perception, before the mind has been able to recognize the form, before an idea has been grafted onto it. The materials are left raw and without any particular color, so as not to burden the form with an aesthetic or emotional will.”
She also claims the inconsistent, fragile and ephemeral character of these pieces that time will inevitably alter and destroy. This feeling is reinforced by the omnipresence of emptiness, made perceptible by the openings that some sculptures present. From the uncertainty and its acceptance results a major responsibility granted to the spectator in the appreciation of the forms. We are invited to appropriate them, to penetrate the space in which they evolve and to maintain a kinesthetic relationship with them.
Olga Sabko was born in 1990 in Kiev. She now lives in Paris, where she studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Art. She studied graphic arts at the National Technical University of Ukraine, as well as modern calligraphy and ancient Slavic and European scripts. Her sculptural work has greatly influenced her relationship with other media, as evidenced by her lithographic work, which is a process combining intuition and accident. Using ink, water, acid and gum arabic, these abstract and graphic works testify to the spatio-temporal context of creation, that of the apprehension of a form before it is frozen by a meaning, as well as the physical and chemical qualities of their components.