Vasil Artamanov and Alexey Klyukov "Socialism"
Czech Center New York / The Bohemian National Hall
This event has ended.
The show “Socialism” by Vasil Artamanov and Alexey Klyukov, is a site-specific project created specifically for the Gallery of the Czech Center New York reflecting their fresh, first time experiences visiting New York.
The Artist collaborators Vasil Artamanov and Alexey Klyukov were both born in Russia and are now living and working in Prague, Czech Republic. They are the 2010 Chalupecky Award recepients. The duo have worked collaboratively since 2006. Their practice includes a wide range of media such as interventions in public spaces, video performance and installations and traditional paintings that often reflect art history; mainly Russian avant-garde or cubism. In their works history is reintroduced with a hint of irony, in other projects they deal with cultural and socio-political issues relating to the process of the development of a democratic system.
Alexey Klyuykov(1983) and Vasil Artamonov(1980) are Russian artists living in Prague. They realize multi-component installations, mixing various media, combining sculpture, painting, object and photography.
Constructions created by them often become geometrical variation, they arise on the basis of everyday belongings, as an effect of their fragmentation and physical disintegration. Klyuykov and Artamonov deconstruct ordinary objects as furniture, stretcher bars or floor boards to build new forms of them. Relation between whole and fragment is the keynote of their many realizations, new organization of space and object becomes something possible and physically real. Geometrical, minimalist spatial forms, installations composed of straight lines or abstract graffiti on railway cars induce to seeking for distant relation with abstractionism, and specially with Russian Avant-garde (probably no by chance one of the Russian duet’s action was one-hour seance of calling up the spirit of Kazimierz Malewicz). This is for sure relation marked with distance and perverse humor.
The significant example is an installation M. Bakunin, F. Engels, S. Freud, P. Kropotkin, K. Marx, P. Mondrian, S. Zizek, composed of devil’s masks cut out wooden boards. Looking more carefully it appears that horned shapes are indeed contours of male beards. Placed on the floor or leant on a wall masks intertwine one another creating an image of intellectual exchange between social philosophy and art in XX century.
Yet political themes appear extremely discreetly in artists’ realizations, by overlapping layers or dispersing various elements they use the strategy of mixing tracks, of masking meanings.
Minimalist installations require of spectator attentive look and give satisfaction of solving mysteries – in Alexey and Vasil’s work dominate non obviousness and decentralization. Mixed means are accompanied by mixture of themes, ironic social critique in modern style interweaves with personal reminiscences, everyday life clashes with History.
This freedom – because creativity of Klyuykov and Artamonov is an image of released thought – results in a sense from the method of work. Precisely constructed installations are in a high degree improvised. Taking the formal point of departure and keeping in hands initial plan of action, artists give the shape to an exhibition during a montage. If physical work converges here with intellectual effort, we get in effect thought-out set of objects/signs to an open interpretation.
~Zuzanna Hadryś, Michał Lasota
Media
Schedule
from September 22, 2011 to November 02, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-22 from 18:30 to 20:30