Maria Kokkori

Biography

Maria Kokkori works on early twentieth-century European art, with a special interest in Russian modernism, the materiality of art, and the intersections among art, science and technology. Her research and teaching focus on artists’ materials and techniques, characterization of visual and material changes, the application of new methods for object-based studies, material properties and technologies, color theories, and artists as producers. Her research has been supported by the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the Malevich Society, New York. Author and co-editor of Utopia: Russian art and culture 1900-1989 (2013), she is currently working on a book publication on Kazimir Malevich and the Unovis group. She received her PhD in Object-Based Art History in 2008 from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, following advanced degrees in painting conservation and materials science. A Research Fellow in the Department of Conservation Science at the Art Institute of Chicago, she regularly teaches UChicago’s Suzanne Deal Booth Seminars in Conservation and Conservation Science.

Publications

Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond, eds. Maria Kokkori, Christina Lodder and Maria Mileeva (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2013)

“Les laboratoires artistiques de Vitebsk pour la reconstruction du monde,” in Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch - L’avant-garde russe à Vitebsk (1918-1922), ed. Angela Lampe, exh. cat. (Centre Pompidou, 2018)

“More Than a Pure Technical Sensation’: Twentieth-Century Metallic Paints, Their Formulations and Use in Paintings,” in ICOM-CC 18th Triennial Conference Preprints, ed. J. Bridgland (2017)

“Metallic Factures: László Moholy-Nagy and Kazimir Malevich,” Leonardo (2017)

“László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting Materials: From Substance to Light,” Leonardo (2017)

“From the Streets to the Canvas: on the Use of Bituminous Asphalt in Early Soviet Constructivist Paintings,” in Painting Techniques, History, Materials and Studio Practice, ed. Arie Wallert (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2017)

“The Painting Techniques of Kazimir Malevich: 1900-1910,” in Painting Techniques, History, Materials and Studio Practice, ed. Arie Wallert (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2017)

“Materials and Meanings: analyzing Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses in the 4th Dimension’,” in Advances in the Non-Invasive Analysis of Painted Surfaces (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016)