23 сентября 2016

E.V.C.F.E.

Anna Nova Gallery, St.-Petersburg, Russia

23 September 2016 -

12 November 2016

In the end of September Anna Nova gallery presents a new project of Pavel Brat. In his previous works the artist experimented with collages; he created a three-dimensional relief from glossy magazine pages, making allusions to the iconography, religion and cultural history. Now he turns to working with objects. The artist creates abstract shapes, reminding images of the plant world, from sheets of paper and covers them by mortar (the composition of which he prefers to keep secret).

The quote from the Gospel of John, which gave the name to the whole exhibition, is not a call to look for hidden religious meanings in the objects, but rather, a literal description of what the spectator sees in front of them: the books, created by the artist, become unique artifacts, mythical creatures.

"So now, more than a year has passed since I changed my attitude and approach to the images that I create. One day, having transformed creative processes in a chain of some successive experiments, similar to a scientific research, I turned my workshop into a real laboratory. The laboratory where I began solving very classic and modest alchemical problems: the conversion of non-living matter into living one.

For the experiments I created pieces of flesh, from thin sheets of paper collected in a hardcover and fastened by bright red covers. These books were my guinea pigs. The result of my experiments was an essay on the fear of death, disclosed in the images of mythical creatures, put to death in the course of rituals, saved and displayed in the form of exhibits inside their myth "(Pavel Brat, the artist)

Pavel Brat (born in 1987, in Voronezh) experiments with paper, studying its properties and relations with other materials. From collages he went on to three-dimensional shapes, creating objects and reliefs from dense books and magazines sheets. He participated in many group and solo exhibitions, such as "Body weight" (Triumph gallery, Moscow), "Icons" (PERMM Museum in Perm, the art space Tkachi, St. Petersburg), in the center of Dukley Gardens ( Montenegro), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), in Erarta gallery (St. Petersburg, London, Hong Kong), in the White Box gallery (New York, the USA), in the SRC Winzavod (Moscow) and others. Lives and works in St. Petersburg.