Past Continuous is a group exhibition bringing together the work of Igor Ost, Semyon Agroskin and Anne Marie Finné. At its core is an exploration of the persistence of images across time: the ways in which memories are formed, transformed and reactivated, and how the past continues to inhabit the present—not as a fixed archive, but as something fluid, unstable and continually reshaped through perception and experience.
The title Past Continuous refers to a grammatical tense, but also to a particular experience of time. Rather than separating past and present into distinct categories, it suggests a temporal condition in which what has already happened remains active. Memories resurface, images return, places are reconstructed, and fragments of experience acquire new meanings each time they are recalled. In this sense, the past is not behind us; it continues to unfold within the present.
The three artists approach this condition from markedly different perspectives and through distinct material languages.
In Igor Ost’s work, landscape becomes a space of both recollection and transformation. His images oscillate between the recognisable and the imagined, drawing on elements of nature, architecture and lived experience. Works such as Past Continuous (2022), Peaceful Sky (2022), The Heart of the Forest (2025), Shelter (2025) and Sound of the Waves(2025) evoke places that seem at once intimate and strangely inaccessible. Ost does not simply depict landscape; he constructs an atmosphere in which perception itself becomes uncertain. Nature appears less as a stable subject than as a psychological territory, shaped by memory, distance and the passage of time.
Semyon Agroskin approaches memory through a different register. His Flashback series transforms recollection into a fragmented visual structure. Rather than reconstructing specific events, Agroskin explores the way memory operates through partial images, omissions and discontinuities. The title itself is revealing: a flashback is not a complete return to the past, but an abrupt irruption of something that has been retained, displaced or transformed by consciousness. Alongside these works, Open door and Open door 2 (2025) introduce a potent spatial metaphor: the threshold between what is remembered and what remains inaccessible. Agroskin's paintings suggest that remembering is always also an act of invention.
For Anne Marie Finné, the relationship between memory and image is closely connected to the history of painting itself. Her works engage with landscapes and motifs associated with earlier artists, including Constable, Poussin, Théodore Rousseau and d'Arthois. Yet these references do not function as quotations in the traditional sense. Finné reconsiders inherited images through an intensely material and contemporary process, allowing fragments of art history to become personal visual experiences. Her Nuit Claire, Cheminement and Vue de peintre works move between recognition and disappearance, creating landscapes that appear to hover between an observed world and a remembered one.
Placed together, the three practices reveal different forms of temporal displacement. Ost's landscapes seem to emerge from memory; Agroskin's paintings expose memory as fragmentation; Finné's works examine the afterlife of images and the persistence of art-historical vision. Their dialogue makes visible a central paradox: although time moves forward, images do not necessarily remain in the past. They are continually reinterpreted, reactivated and transformed by the present.
