Ivan Chuikov: Fragments
Ivan Chuikov grew up in Moscow, training at the Soviet art schools in the 1950s, and going on to be a teacher himself, as well as a member of the Union of Artists. He spent much of his time producing backdrops for collective farm theatre productions at the Moscow Institute for Applied Arts. Later, he became a close associate of the so-called Sretensky Boulevard group, and had the opportunity to exhibit his own paintings privately at art studios from the 1970s. Chuikov developed a pictorial style which had parallels to the Pop Art aesthetics of Tom Wesselmann or Surrealists such as Rene Magritte. Often painting in flat, unmixed colours, his main motifs were the reproductions he found around him - books on art history, picture postcards, TV screens and symbols from printed propaganda. Since these days he has pursued a life-long fascination with the act of looking and the manufacture of visual signs and images.
The current exhibition, which is the artist's first solo show in the UK, focuses on the fragmentation that has characterised Chuikov's work for many years. As critic Boris Groys has pointed out - fragmentation and recombination have been a dominant topic of philosophical discussion during the last century. Whereas many commentators have concentrated on the particular violence or "struggle for power" associated with these discourses, Chuikov's work appears much more at ease with the source material it appropriates from.
In the epic painting Romantic Seascape II (1989), Chuikov has painted numerous different shapes, slotted together side-by-side like a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece comes in a different style. Broad, thick, abstract brushstrokes form segments next to areas of watery green and yellow washes reminiscent of Old Masters. Despite such differing techniques an image of a seascape emerges as a whole. Here, Chuikov willingly disrupts the conventions of unity and composition, to bring attention to context as well as present viewers with a portrait of the bare materials out of which the work is made. Such conceptual conceits run through many of Chuikov's other works which are also presented in the exhibition - from his Fragments of Newspapers series which were produced in recent years, through to hi Fragments of Postcards series from the 1990s (in which small details are blown up from the printed images to produce compositions resembling colour-field painting and other such chapters from the history of abstraction), as well as his more familiar paintings on window frames in which images literally 'fold into space' or overlap to suggest potentially infinite combinations.
Boris Groys has written of Chuikov that "Every hierarchy is de-hierarchised in his work, every central position is decentered. All artistic forms are recognised as equally important - but that happens only when they are deprived of their traditional ideological pretence... Twenty years after, the artist continues his work without being distracted by numerous antagonistic fashions following nothing but the immanent logic of his method."
Ivan Chuikov lives and works in Berlin. His works are featured in numerous international museum collections including the Ludwig Forum f眉r Internationale Kunst, Aachen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and, the Pushkin State Museum of Arts, Moscow. His solo shows have included Ivan Chuikov 1966-1997 at the Kulturabteilung AG Bayer, Leverkusen (1999) as well as the retrospective exhibition
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Ivan Chuikov grew up in Moscow, training at the Soviet art schools in the 1950s, and going on to be a teacher himself, as well as a member of the Union of Artists. He spent much of his time producing backdrops for collective farm theatre productions at the Moscow Institute for Applied Arts. Later, he became a close associate of the so-called Sretensky Boulevard group, and had the opportunity to exhibit his own paintings privately at art studios from the 1970s. Chuikov developed a pictorial style which had parallels to the Pop Art aesthetics of Tom Wesselmann or Surrealists such as Rene Magritte. Often painting in flat, unmixed colours, his main motifs were the reproductions he found around him - books on art history, picture postcards, TV screens and symbols from printed propaganda. Since these days he has pursued a life-long fascination with the act of looking and the manufacture of visual signs and images.
The current exhibition, which is the artist's first solo show in the UK, focuses on the fragmentation that has characterised Chuikov's work for many years. As critic Boris Groys has pointed out - fragmentation and recombination have been a dominant topic of philosophical discussion during the last century. Whereas many commentators have concentrated on the particular violence or "struggle for power" associated with these discourses, Chuikov's work appears much more at ease with the source material it appropriates from.
In the epic painting Romantic Seascape II (1989), Chuikov has painted numerous different shapes, slotted together side-by-side like a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece comes in a different style. Broad, thick, abstract brushstrokes form segments next to areas of watery green and yellow washes reminiscent of Old Masters. Despite such differing techniques an image of a seascape emerges as a whole. Here, Chuikov willingly disrupts the conventions of unity and composition, to bring attention to context as well as present viewers with a portrait of the bare materials out of which the work is made. Such conceptual conceits run through many of Chuikov's other works which are also presented in the exhibition - from his Fragments of Newspapers series which were produced in recent years, through to hi Fragments of Postcards series from the 1990s (in which small details are blown up from the printed images to produce compositions resembling colour-field painting and other such chapters from the history of abstraction), as well as his more familiar paintings on window frames in which images literally 'fold into space' or overlap to suggest potentially infinite combinations.
Boris Groys has written of Chuikov that "Every hierarchy is de-hierarchised in his work, every central position is decentered. All artistic forms are recognised as equally important - but that happens only when they are deprived of their traditional ideological pretence... Twenty years after, the artist continues his work without being distracted by numerous antagonistic fashions following nothing but the immanent logic of his method."
Ivan Chuikov lives and works in Berlin. His works are featured in numerous international museum collections including the Ludwig Forum f眉r Internationale Kunst, Aachen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and, the Pushkin State Museum of Arts, Moscow. His solo shows have included Ivan Chuikov 1966-1997 at the Kulturabteilung AG Bayer, Leverkusen (1999) as well as the retrospective exhibition
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