Ovcharenko

Ivan Chuykov

13 Nov - 06 Dec 2008

© Ivan Chuykov
'Fragment of Spanish Newspaper', 2008
acrylic on canvas
100x150cm
IVAN CHUYKOV
"Void "

13th November - 6th December 2008

The Regina Gallery is happy to announce Void, a new project by Ivan Chuykov.

Ivan Chuykov’s oeuvre has acquired the museum status recently, and it is highly acclaimed by art experts and collectors. The 1998 personal show of Ivan Chuykov held by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow was a part of the retrospective series devoted to the artists of the Moscow conceptualism circles and offered the Moscow viewers artworks created by the author during previous 30 years.

“Ivan Chuykov received classic education in art based on drawing from nature, but he joined the underground milieu in early 1970s. Without refuting his origin, he turned to its critical examination. The deconstruction of metaphysical and mythological pretence in depiction is now a permanent theme of his work. In this sense he is a part of the greater (and, perhaps, main one) tradition of the russian art associated with the conceptual exploration of the figurative depiction as a text form.

Fragments become the main conceptual series of Chuykov since mid 1970s, here he studies every depiction as a disjointed, fragmentary object on principle. The fragment is a kind of new abstraction for him. Fragmentation prevents the image from acquiring totality and pretending to be organic, turning it thus into a text form which can be analyzed and criticized. During the late 1990s, when Ivan Chuykov was already based in Germany, his Fragments series acquire a different object – it is not paintings or ideological posters now, it is newspapers in different languages.

The mystery of depiction proper, of its genesis and its variety has always been the greatest stimulus for Chuykov as an artist. The void is a sort of a mystery, something incomprehensible for him, something that generates meanings. The true moral aim of the artist as it is manifested in this series is to devote oneself to the study of art as self-generating practice.” (Ekaterina Dyogot)

Void is the sixth show of Ivan Chuikov at the Regina gallery. His other Regina projects include the theory of reflection i (1992) (later displayed at the Stella art foundation in 2008), interior fragments (1995) and a wonderful view from the window (2000), a device for the observation of Void and Infinity (2001), New works (2005). The Void show at the Regina gallery will present six new paintings from the fragments series and the device for the observation of void and infinity which was first created by the author in 2001 and updated this year. In this work the artist uses a complex system of double mirrors to avoid the presence of any reflection, or to produce the reflection of the void, to be more exact. These works represent the topicality of abstract painting today and develop the “minimalist” line in the oeuvre of Ivan Chuykov, one of the best artists of the Moscow conceptualism.

Ivan Semyonovich Chuykov was born on may 22, 1935, in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow state art institute named after Surikov in 1960. His first exhibition was held in 1957, during the 7th world youth festival in Moscow. Member of the Artists’ Union since 1967. He took part in the shows of non-official art since 1976. Today the works of Ivan Chuykov are in major museum and private collections of art, such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, Zimmerly Art Museum, New Jersey, Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and the State Tretyakov gallery in Moscow.

A catalogue featuring the article by Ekaterina Dyogot, an art critic, will accompany this exhibition.
 

Tags: Ivan Chuikov