The Cost of Protection - Stasia Grishina in Focus.
Stasia Grishina
Born: United Kingdom
Based in: Frankfurt, Germany
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Objects
Education: HfG Offenbach, Stage Design & Sculpture
Recent Exhibitions: Rundgang HfG , Offenbach, 2025 Niemandsland (group), Offenbach, 2025 Depend upon Man (solo), Fābula Gallery, Moscow, 2024
Website: stasiagrishina.com
Instagram: @art.stasia
Image Courtesy: Courtesy the Artist
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.
Stasia Grishina , Work in progress , 2026, studio view, Frankfurt, Germany. Mixed materials including plaster, wood, and wax. Courtesy of the artist.
Stasia Grishina , Work in progress (studio detail), 2026, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Sculptural components emerge through layering, carving, and assembly, holding traces of both control and accident. Courtesy of the artist.
Stasia Grishina, Work in progress , 2026, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Casting fragments and forming elements reveal an ongoing process between body, object, and transformation. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Stasia Grishina , Man on all fours , 2025, installation view, Rundgang HfG, HfG Main-Building, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Wooden panels, rigging, clothes, 100 × 200 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina , Man on all fours (detail), 2025, Artist in Focus by Catapult, Rundgang HfG, Offenbach am Main. A suited figure withdraws into a fragile doghouse structure built from found wood. Courtesy of the artistStasia Grishina , Man on all fours , 2025, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Installation view at HfG Offenbach. The phrase “Home sweet home” appears on the soles, turning shelter into a psychological construct rather than protection. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Stasia Grishina , What matters is the Degree of Sincerity , 2024, installation view, Unopened Rundgang HfG, GROW, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Wooden panels, rigging, fabric, epoxy, 515 × 150 × 203 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina , What matters is the Degree of Sincerity , 2024, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Dog-like figures assembled from discarded cupboards and panels stage a space of attachment, observation, and power. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Stasia Grishina , DEPEND UPON MAN II , 2024, installation view, Depend upon Man (solo exhibition), Fābula Gallery (hangar), Moscow, Russia. Aluminium, plywood, candles, water, pebbles, sound, motors, 305 × 240 × 130 cm. Photo: Natalia Melikova. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina, DEPEND UPON MAN II , 2024, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Aluminium panels with dog forms stand in a field of candlelight, staging a controlled sequence of light, sound, and duration. Photo: Natalia Melikova. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
Stasia Grishina, Looking for smth. more , 2025, Artist in Focus by Catapult. Dog silhouettes emerge from layered maps and printed fragments, forming a shifting boundary between territory, body, and image. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina, Looking for smth. more , 2025, installation view, GUCK MAL DRÜBER NACH (group exhibition), Hafenspace, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Maps, pencil, 610 × 210 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina , Schnauze , 2025, installation view, NIEMANDSLAND (group exhibition), Bundesstraße 448, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Wood, rigging, 300 × 275 × 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina , Schnauze , 2025, Artist in Focus by Catapult. A low, mobile structure interrupts the road beneath a bridge, shifting between obstacle, stage, and temporary architecture. Courtesy of the artist.Stasia Grishina , The Ballad of the Fall , 2024, installation view, Borrowed Flowers (group exhibition), Hafenspace, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Wooden panels, rigging, horse tail, 205 × 184 × 13 cm. Courtesy of the artist
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
About Catapult
This is an artist interview published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond. catapult.art
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