Men in Suits

Maria Gvardeitseva’s Men in Suits (2024) and her performance during the opening night were presented as part of the Re:Vision East Wing Biennial — a major exhibition exploring how contemporary artists interrogate and reframe historical narratives. Men in Suits is a performative installation that re-acts and re-invents the legacy of patriarchal power through symbolic materials and embodied gesture. Drawing on Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, this work disrupts the historical canon by replacing the absent male artist with a present female body. The artist becomes both observer and agent, reclaiming autonomy through action. In this ritual-like performance, Gvardeitseva soaks men’s suits in a vivid blue she names International Misogynistic Blue. Once symbols of authority, the suits are stripped of their wearers, dropped, stepped on, and imprinted onto paper, leaving behind fragile traces of a rigid, fading system. These marks are not just stains; they are memory-prints — a visual archive of collapse and transition. Men in Suits reconstructs the visual language of power, inviting us to re-vision what is preserved and what is allowed to expire. It questions who writes history and insists on the right to revise it. In the liminal space of the “blue hour,” where one cycle ends and another begins, Gvardeitseva imagines new structures — flexible, inclusive, and alive with potential.