Ivan Razumov

THE CITY OF SUBLIME LOVE AND GREAT FUCK

NK Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition by Ivan Razumov ‘The City of Sublime Love and Great Fuck’. For this project Ivan Razumov created new works, where he reflects on contemporary culture by use of his typical irony and fantasy.

Contemporary culture rapidly produces images with an unseen intensity. Digesting this excessive flow seems like the central occupation of people nowadays. Meanings, styles, ideologies behind the images, music and voices behind the camera – they follow us everywhere, even in our dreams. Acting as a hunter, the artist chases an image, catches it from the flow, and after it is studied and analysed, the image becomes a life-long staff member of the theater, which in psychoanalysis is called “The Other Scene”. Collisions in the inner theater result in the creation of new meanings and images, the essence of an artist’s work.

The merging of genres is another important phenomenon of contemporary culture. Marginal subcultures and genres become part of the mainstream. Fine arts and illustration start to overlap. Children’s taboo and conventions are denied and at the same time fairy tales are not only for children anymore. Popular memes and viral images take over the old concepts.

“In the culture where I was brought up, the status of written word and literature was overpriced, while images remained a suspect. Fine arts and illustration where legal, while comics and satirical images didn’t really develop that much. Due to the logo-centric totalitarianism, comics have not become part of the mass culture in Russia and always remained marginal. Our lives, however, start to increasingly simulate the comics or graphic novels, with their primitive grotesque, moral ambivalence and unpredictability.

Artists: Ivan Razumov