WINZAVOD contemporary art center
invites to the «START»

04.09.2011 — 16.10.2011

The sculpture competition

Project author:

Ilya Grishaev

START's artist

The Arts Council of Winery has identified 3 winners of modern sculpture in the framework of the Project support young art START:
— Pavel Grishin, Moscow, project «Quiet time»
— Dmitry Filippov, Gorniak, the project «untitled»
Jablonna Maria, Tomsk, project «Artificially recreated»
Inauguration of the projects of the winners was held on 4 September on the Large-area of Winery.
«Conceiving sculpture competition we took risks. Do we have sculptors? And if they can think of in a modern language? And to work with a real material? Is there someone to help? What was our surprise, when we received hundreds of proposals. And no! We had to choose from. We have wonderful winners who meet all the demands of the time. So, we made the right choice and sculpture is truly being reborn. And reasonably requires urgent attention!»
Curator of the project START Arseniy Zhilyaev
Competition of modern sculpture in the framework of the project support young art START began on 1 March 2011.

Applications were accepted in the form of sketches or photos of any type of sculpture made from metal (or with metal elements).
The return of sculptures in modern art is one of the most important events of the last decade. More recently, the trend towards the dematerialization in contemporary art (performans, happenings, video art, conceptual art, etc.) together with a large influence of Internet seemes to have pushed out of the exhibition halls the usual media. But history decided otherwise. The past decade brought back tangibility and visibility to the contemporary art works.. Today we see that together with a technical revolution in processing of materials is being reviewed the idea of what is a modern sculpture.

For Russian art, the crisis of traditional media has been particularly heavy. Its effects are still being felt today. Unfortunately, for the last 20 years has been almost completely destroyed a giant industrial base of the Soviet artists. Gradually has been degraded the system of art education. The artists have been taken away their workshops, or just have been forgotten to give the new ones. Obviously, in such conditions it is difficult to talk about a professional sculpture because it requires a high level of training, knowledge of the history of modern art and a large workshop! However, the situation began to change. Many famous Russian artists in the second half of 00 from conceptual considerations turned back to sculpture. They started to develop new technological processes. At the same time the alternative art education initiatives appeared. And finally, one of the main trends of the last decade which is associated with the reviewing of the legacy of modernism, required the artists to appeal once again to the formal language of the three-dimensional art, and sometimes using a classic modernist material.

The work of Pavel Grishin «Quiet time» — a design resembling a plant for the production of meat, but instead of animal carcasses on iron hooks there are mattresses. «A man spends most of his life in a dream and just before he died, he really wakes up,» says the author. Grishin says the desires to overcome everyday life through «ideas for supernatural accomplishments». We are talking about the existential experience of the human being in all its fatality and inevitability of death in the final. But the acceptance of his limbs allows a person to feel fully his existence. This raises a bloody metaphor of the plant for slaughter. Sinister composition, silently calling for the revival hangs on the edge between sculpture and installation, denoting at the same time the limits of the genre of sculpture and the possibilities of a human experience.

Dima Filippov in his work «Untitled» tries to re-invent the idea, what is modern sculpture. In his view, the classical sculpture it is like the fortress that holds the content and formal volume, which correspond to the immutability of traditional ideas about the ethnics, culture, etc. In modern terms this kind of static nature and closeness is impossible. «Like a submarine, which retired on invalid depth, was exposed to the inevitable deformation so the sculpture, inappropriate for the current ideology feels the force of pressure,» says Filipov. The answer of the artist is in creation of a complex biomorphic shape of steel, which is trying to express the dynamics of modernity in a strict isolation of the sculptural volume.

The project of Maria Alaninol «Artificially recreated» is a part of the map materialized in metal . The starting point is a «convenient» nature processed by the human ratio. So stated the fact of irreversible changes which have occurred with humanity for the last 40-50 years. Our nature became the technique, and our feelings were digitized and uploaded in a social net

Return of a sculpture to contemporary art — one of the most important events of the last decade. Today we see how, together with technological revolutions in production and processing of materials, change the image of what a modern sculpture is.