Stasia Grishina - Frankfurt, sculpture and installation

Something in Stasia Grishina's work enters the room on all fours. Her sculptures and installations place the human figure in architectures built for animals, and refuse to explain the arrangement.

She works with found wood, discarded furniture, aluminum, and materials that carry traces of domestic life: not as nostalgia, but as evidence of how structures of care and control become indistinguishable.

The dog is a recurring figure in her work, not as symbol but as structural argument. In the William Cowper poem that provides the title for her Depend Upon Man series, animals endure dependence and discover "at how dear a rate / he sells protection."

Grishina's sculptures hold that sentence up and turn it slowly. The figure that is supposed to be in control keeps slipping into the posture of the subordinated.

The shelter does not protect from the cold. It protects from reality itself.

Man on all fours (2025) places a figure in a dark suit inside a hand-built wooden structure just large enough to crawl into, a doghouse assembled from found panels, its patchwork roof composed of offcuts in different colors.

The figure is visible only from behind: legs extended, shoes on the floor.

On the soles: "Home sweet home." The phrase has arrived emptied of comfort. The installation does not dramatize the situation. The shelter is fragile, imperfect; the stability it offers is entirely psychological. That a suited adult would need this, and that the need seems credible, is where the work holds its pressure.

'What matters is the Degree of Sincerity' (2024) approaches the same territory differently. Dog-shaped figures assembled from discarded cupboards, doors, and panels are placed on podiums draped in theatrical fabric.

The rough construction makes no attempt at naturalism, it carries what the material was before, domestic furniture turned into bodies under observation. The installation describes what Grishina calls a space of "attachment, observation, and power," positioning the viewer inside it without announcing a verdict.

The Depend Upon Man works extend the inquiry into ceremony. Depend Upon Man II, shown at Fābula Gallery in Moscow, fills a dark industrial hangar with tall aluminum panels etched with dog forms, dozens of candles burning along their tops, water below.

Every three minutes: a bang. At the end, candles are extinguished in the water. Cold light remains. The mechanics of the ritual are precise. Its subject is not named.

Grishina trained in stage design and sculpture, a combination visible in how her installations occupy space. They function as situations rather than displays.

The human-animal threshold in her practice holds a compressed model of social relations that extend much further: who has the right to observe, who becomes the subject of study, who needs the shelter and at what cost.

Exhibiting across Germany, Russia, and Armenia, her practice maintains a consistency of argument across formally unlike work, the hand-built shelter, the etched aluminum panel, the wall-scale map collage, without resolving into a single statement.

What the work does not do is offer an exit. The figure in the doghouse does not emerge, because the condition it describes is not temporary.

Instagram Stasia Grishina

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