Vladimir Dubossarsky & Alexander Vinogradov
08 Jun - 16 Jul 2011
DUBOSSARSKY & VINOGRADOV
8 June - 16 July, 2011
«An Artist must be simple-minded»/ «An Artist should not be over wise»
At a certain moment we realized that the object of our works could be whatever you could imagine and a sense of internal liberation, purification and relief immediately came. To be honest, it is a very comfortable, light condition. We used to make up our stories before but now we are taking them from the reality. However, it does not prevent them from being sometimes phantasmagorical, sometimes lyrical. As our studio is located in Khimki, this small provincial town, located in the suburbs of Moscow city, living its own life, became one of our central figures. We discover everything in it: a comedy and a tragedy, farce and beauty.
We see suprematism in town architecture, Malevich’s and Mondrian’s abstractions - in silly advertising, besides we see beautiful girls in miniskirts who hit the streets in hot summer days. They are not top models but ordinary people who without suspecting anything become the central figures of our paintings. We used to believe that it is not vital for contemporary art but we have changed our focus.
We wished to sink deep into the reality and see its beauty. Not glamorous, artificial, faked surface we have worked with before, not Soviet baroque or Hollywood but the real beauty of life. Mass media movies, magazines, advertising habituated us to emasculated, glamorous beauty and it is difficult for us to admire a leaf in the wind or a spider line. They are just concealed behind aggressive pushy adverting glamour. We used to work with media trash for quite a lot of years but now, on the one hand, we are fed up with it, on the other, the wind seems to be changing...
In general an artist should be simple-minded in order not to make anything up but to let the air flow go through him. So it seemed quite natural for us that in the 1990s we worked with the Soviet age aesthetics, in the 2000s switched to glamour, magazines, models, fitness - now a new time seems to be coming. However, in 1980s each of us did something similar to what we are doing now. You can find the prototype of “Khimky - Life” in our recent works. They used to be a part of something and now they are the main flow. You can say that they are the ideas from the old baggage arranged anew.
We walk along the streets and take pictures. There are days when we take 2000-30000 photographs. As a result we have the whole world in our computer from which we can choose the stories we like best. Some pictures are used for graphics, others - for an oil painting and the third ones for a watercolor. We almost give up editing pictures, so our works are very similar to photography.
We are against such terms as “new sincerity” or “new realism”. All we want to do is to take a contemporary life image and to portray it. We are making the whole picture from pieces of mosaic. There are cheerful, sad and rainy works. The girls are talking about something, the men are standing near the car, the veterans sit on the bench drinking, the woman stands thinking, waiting for someone... Speaking about prototypes, the woks resemble Pimenov in something or Daineka or Faibisovich. We can recite a hundred of other names because we don’t really have any references to them. It is still not easy for us to express something definitely. We have launched a new flow, sometimes we lead it, sometimes it leads us.
Vladimir Dubossarsky, Alexander Vinogradov 2011
Vladimir Dubossarsky (born Moscow, 1964) and Alexander Vinogradov (born Moscow, 1963) live in Moscow where they have collaborated since 1994. In 2011 they have had a solo show at Triumph Gallery, Moscow and in 2010 at Paperworks Gallery, Moscow and at Gallery Charlotte Moser, Geneva. In 2009 they represented Russia at the 53 Venice Biennale with their installation ‘Danger! Museum’. In 2011 they will be included in From Russia with Love, Palazzo Panichi e Museo Virtuale piazza Duomo, Pietrasanta, Lucca and Inspiration Dior at The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow. In 2010 they were included in Contrepoint, L’art Contemporain Russe De L’icône à L’avant-garde en Passant par le Musée Louvre, Paris and in 2009 From A Study to An Art-Object Moscow Museum of Modern Art and in Art 21 RUSSIA at the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev.
8 June - 16 July, 2011
«An Artist must be simple-minded»/ «An Artist should not be over wise»
At a certain moment we realized that the object of our works could be whatever you could imagine and a sense of internal liberation, purification and relief immediately came. To be honest, it is a very comfortable, light condition. We used to make up our stories before but now we are taking them from the reality. However, it does not prevent them from being sometimes phantasmagorical, sometimes lyrical. As our studio is located in Khimki, this small provincial town, located in the suburbs of Moscow city, living its own life, became one of our central figures. We discover everything in it: a comedy and a tragedy, farce and beauty.
We see suprematism in town architecture, Malevich’s and Mondrian’s abstractions - in silly advertising, besides we see beautiful girls in miniskirts who hit the streets in hot summer days. They are not top models but ordinary people who without suspecting anything become the central figures of our paintings. We used to believe that it is not vital for contemporary art but we have changed our focus.
We wished to sink deep into the reality and see its beauty. Not glamorous, artificial, faked surface we have worked with before, not Soviet baroque or Hollywood but the real beauty of life. Mass media movies, magazines, advertising habituated us to emasculated, glamorous beauty and it is difficult for us to admire a leaf in the wind or a spider line. They are just concealed behind aggressive pushy adverting glamour. We used to work with media trash for quite a lot of years but now, on the one hand, we are fed up with it, on the other, the wind seems to be changing...
In general an artist should be simple-minded in order not to make anything up but to let the air flow go through him. So it seemed quite natural for us that in the 1990s we worked with the Soviet age aesthetics, in the 2000s switched to glamour, magazines, models, fitness - now a new time seems to be coming. However, in 1980s each of us did something similar to what we are doing now. You can find the prototype of “Khimky - Life” in our recent works. They used to be a part of something and now they are the main flow. You can say that they are the ideas from the old baggage arranged anew.
We walk along the streets and take pictures. There are days when we take 2000-30000 photographs. As a result we have the whole world in our computer from which we can choose the stories we like best. Some pictures are used for graphics, others - for an oil painting and the third ones for a watercolor. We almost give up editing pictures, so our works are very similar to photography.
We are against such terms as “new sincerity” or “new realism”. All we want to do is to take a contemporary life image and to portray it. We are making the whole picture from pieces of mosaic. There are cheerful, sad and rainy works. The girls are talking about something, the men are standing near the car, the veterans sit on the bench drinking, the woman stands thinking, waiting for someone... Speaking about prototypes, the woks resemble Pimenov in something or Daineka or Faibisovich. We can recite a hundred of other names because we don’t really have any references to them. It is still not easy for us to express something definitely. We have launched a new flow, sometimes we lead it, sometimes it leads us.
Vladimir Dubossarsky, Alexander Vinogradov 2011
Vladimir Dubossarsky (born Moscow, 1964) and Alexander Vinogradov (born Moscow, 1963) live in Moscow where they have collaborated since 1994. In 2011 they have had a solo show at Triumph Gallery, Moscow and in 2010 at Paperworks Gallery, Moscow and at Gallery Charlotte Moser, Geneva. In 2009 they represented Russia at the 53 Venice Biennale with their installation ‘Danger! Museum’. In 2011 they will be included in From Russia with Love, Palazzo Panichi e Museo Virtuale piazza Duomo, Pietrasanta, Lucca and Inspiration Dior at The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow. In 2010 they were included in Contrepoint, L’art Contemporain Russe De L’icône à L’avant-garde en Passant par le Musée Louvre, Paris and in 2009 From A Study to An Art-Object Moscow Museum of Modern Art and in Art 21 RUSSIA at the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev.