Exhibition of photographs by Zakhar Kolovsky "Time of footprints in the sand"

March 29, 2016 in the halls of the MVK RAX Gallery of Arts of Zurab Tsereteli on Prechistenka 19, the opening of the exhibition of photography by Zakhar Kolovsky “Time of footprints in the sand” will take place.

Z. M. Kolovsky was born in 1956 in the city of Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Region. In 1984 he graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, in 2000 - from the St. Petersburg Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. I.E. Repina, Department of Theory and History of Art. From 2002 to the present, he heads the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSFOTO in St. Petersburg. As a curator and exhibitor, he has completed more than 100 exhibition projects. Continuing to work as an artist, Z. Kolovsky created the following series of works: “Windows”, “Electorate”, “Lines”, “Ship Architecture”, “Emergency Surfacing”, which he considers the most significant in his creative biography. His personal exhibitions were held in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Paris, Riga, Zagreb and other Russian and foreign cities.

For the photographer Zakhar Kolovsky, photography appears, first of all, as material for all kinds of artistic experiments. The techniques he resorted to in his work are combining in the image, superimposing different plans and giving unusual dynamics and expressiveness to the technique of multiplying the frame, taking works beyond the scope of photographic art, bringing it closer to the cinema.

The works of Z. Kolovsky are in collections of the State Russian Museum, the Central Naval Museum, the State Center for Contemporary Art, the Latvian National Museum of Art, and in private collections.

“First, I wanted to name the article“ Non-documentary photo of Zakhar Kolovsky. ” There is every reason for this: the author’s work shows an almost programmatic lack of everything that is required from documentary. Nothing from Magnum: neither the events, nor the facture “through” which the phenomenon is represented… Photo-visualism at Kolovsky wants to legitimize its authenticity: nothing introduced, composed, abstract…

In the context of Kolovsky’s work, it’s the experience of getting used to over time, the documentation of this movement. By what means? First of all, work with traces (or traces) of processuality. All that the passage of time is behind: shadows, trails of hiking trails, the width of the edge of melting snow…

How to more accurately determine the poetics of Kolovsky’s photographic images? For myself, I choose the following name: meditative-documentary photography.

… I could compare the author’s position with the hunting one - to incubate, track, lure "nature" for hours. But in the word “hunting” there are connotations of appropriation, of obtaining. The art practice of the artist is free from these burdens. Positioning "according to Kolovsky" means a humble dissolution in natural processes.

The movement of the shadow, the size of the square of light around the faucet, the flutter of curtains - the author is looking for her visual characteristics for temporary ceremonies. He works in series, but often in single shots. Anyway, thinking is palimpsestic: a separate image is ready to expand on its components. A serial - to form a single. Kolovsky’s favorite palimpsest technique was worked out on the motive of the track - in the snow or in the sand. Step by step, route to route, chain of tracks to chain… Another moment is Kolovsky’s landscape work. He likes to take panoramic and at the same time close to the viewer pictures of trees and plants. He is interested in forest thickets and wheat fields, herbage, - the moment of flowering, heading, sweeping - in fact, all the same rapture of the living process. ”

From an article by A. D. Borovsky

“For a long time the dominant myth in art in general, and in photography in particular, the steady myth about the priority of ideas,“ ideas ”in art practice, has weakened, and we are again moving from“ belief ”to“ vision ”. There is a return to the significance of visual, contemplative perception, when conditional artistic spatiality will oppose literature and natural objectivity.

And an example of this is the work presented here.

First impression: traditional aesthetics and visual culture exist freely within the framework of today’s contemporary art; The author’s artistic strategy and photographic practice are completely subordinated to a focused, attentive, restrained, non-fussy perception of the outside world.

In these works there are neither "modernist" visual oddities and overwhelmed with "significance" social commentary, nor a narrative story, nor traces of current, radical phenomena of contemporary art. They have a clear system for building spatial light-color structures.

The author, combining multiple points of view, perceptions, subordinating them to a holistic solution, reveals new meanings for using photographic techniques.

The characteristic multiplicativeness, seriality, apparent panoramicness of the presented works is not a fragmentation of what they saw. This is a process of reflection of one integral complex worldview, its faces, it is a world from different points of view. ”

From an article by V. Orlov

“… Planes extending into the distance, or transparent to the lumen. The plane is the space of the bay, the plane is the space of the lawn or wasteland, the plane is the space of the city square, intersection, gateway. The plane is the space of heaven, this blue tent on top, covering the expanse of water, city landscape, meadow grass.

Nothing seems to happen in these waters of bays and rivers, in parks and forests, on the fringes and city beds. As if all the events had already happened. Wars swept over these cities, autumn and winter already froze and immobilized vegetation, passers-by as if by inertia continue to move wherever they need… Enthusiasm and hope, the enthusiasm of the masses, the horror and despair of the same masses in the besieged city, new hopes and new disappointments are gone into the story. There were grasses at the edge, branches of trees against the sky, a lonely bottle on the pier. Traces remained - in the sand, in the snow, on the pavement.

Just do not think that the St. Petersburg master Kolovsky is some kind of melancholic singer of anemia. His photographs are austere and chilly, like steel. Art in this form, at this stage, is an art of a high degree of hardening. It is already falling, as in heresy, into unheard of simplicity. ”

From the article by A. Yakimovich “A Gaze. Photos of Zakhar Kolovsky”

The exhibition runs until April 17, 2016.