Echoes Across Time, presented by Kocerova Fine Art during Frieze Week, brings together works exploring time, memory and change through five themes: Duration, Pause, Cycle, Flash and Infinity. We sat down for an exclusive interview with Daria Kocerova, ahead of the launch of her new company and inaugural exhibition.
Echoes Across Time, running Monday 12th – Saturday 17th October at Simon C Dickinson Ltd. See more here.
What initially drew you to different understandings of time?
My interest really developed through studying Old Masters and thinking about the strange relationship we have with works created centuries ago. A painting belongs to a very specific historical moment, yet when we stand in front of it, that distance can suddenly disappear. The emotions, landscapes or human experiences it depicts can feel remarkably immediate. I became interested in the idea that time in art is not necessarily linear. A work can contain several forms of time simultaneously: the moment represented by the artist, the period in which it was created, the history it has accumulated as an object, and our own experience of looking at it today. I wanted Echoes Across Time to explore this idea visually rather than chronologically, and to consider how artists separated by centuries can nevertheless appear to speak to one another.
Why was it important to you to bring such a wide range of periods in art together in Echoes Across Time?
I have never felt that art should always be viewed within rigid historical categories. Of course, understanding a work’s historical context is fundamental, but placing Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern works alongside contemporary art can reveal connections that chronology sometimes obscures. Artists continually look backwards as well as forwards: they revisit subjects, compositions and ideas, consciously or unconsciously continuing traditions established generations before them.
Landscape became particularly important to the exhibition because it allows us to trace these connections so naturally. The way artists represent nature changes dramatically across four centuries, from the precise observation of Northern European painters to increasingly subjective experiences of atmosphere, light and colour. Bringing these works together allows us to see both transformation and continuity. I wanted the exhibition to feel like a conversation across centuries rather than a conventional chronological survey.
Today, what are the common perceptions of fleeting memories you’ve noticed in the art world?
We live in a culture in which images are produced, consumed and forgotten extraordinarily quickly. Our experience of art is increasingly mediated through phones, social media and an endless circulation of digital images. We may see hundreds of works without necessarily spending meaningful time with any one of them. In that sense, our visual memory has perhaps become more immediate but also more fleeting.
What interests me is the contrast between this speed and the experience of encountering a physical work of art. Sometimes you remember surprisingly little about an exhibition, yet one particular painting, colour or detail remains with you for years. Memory is selective and subjective; it transforms what we have seen rather than simply recording it. I think this makes the experience of looking slowly particularly important today. Art can interrupt that constant acceleration and create a moment that stays with us.
How does the at least seemingly permanent nature of paintings and visual art more generally impact their representations of time?
There is a fascinating contradiction in painting: it can appear permanent while representing something completely transient. A landscape captures a particular light, a portrait preserves a face at one moment in a life, and a still life may depict flowers or fruit already beginning to decay. The physical object can survive for centuries while the moment it represents may have lasted only seconds.
At the same time, paintings themselves are not truly outside time. They age, change ownership, travel between countries and collections, and are continually reinterpreted by different generations. Their meanings are therefore never entirely fixed. A seventeenth-century painting viewed today carries both the world in which it was created and everything that has happened to it since. This tension between permanence and transience is central to Echoes Across Time: art preserves moments, but our relationship with those moments is constantly changing.
How does Echoes Across Time demonstrate your ambitions for your new company?
Echoes Across Time is very much a statement of what I want Kocerova Fine Art & Advisory to become. My background is in art history, galleries, auction houses and advising private collectors, and I wanted to create a dealership where scholarship and connoisseurship sit alongside a more personal approach to collecting.
The exhibition deliberately brings together Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern works with selected contemporary art. I do not want the gallery to be defined simply by one period, but by the quality of the works and the conversations that can be created between them. For me, dealing is not only about individual transactions; it is also about helping collectors develop collections with coherence, personality and longevity. I hope to build long-term relationships with collectors and institutions while creating exhibitions that encourage people to look at familiar periods and artists from unexpected perspectives