Pavel Pepperstein
Opening Tuesday 27 November 2012 at 6 pm
Exhibition: 27 November - 16 March 2013
We are pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein.
Pavel Pepperstein is one of the most influential artists of Russia’s new generation. In 1987 he co-founded the experimental group of artists “Inspection Medical Hermeneutics”, which, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, developed a critical approach towards the influence of Western culture on Russia. Pepperstein works in may different media. Installations, wall paintings, videos, subtle water colors and graphic works area all aspects of his work; besides that he is also a writer, well known in Russia for his vast fantasy epic “The Mythogenic Love of Castes” (with S. Anufriev) and his detective novel “The Swastika and the Pentagon”.
“But for Pepperstein both fine art and literature are only instruments of investigative activity” writes Irina Kulik in the catalogue of the Russian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale of 2009, “...He examin-es contemporary art, mass culture and philosophy to discover the sources of this 'mythogeny'.” The artistic strategy of Pepperstein and “Medical Hermeneutics” basically consists of artificially creating a self~contained subculture. Its curious vocabulary of terms, references, and designations, whose meaning is often known only to initiates, is interestingly enough, especially convincing and effective to outsiders.
Pepperstein's drawings and watercolors generate an astonishingly compact and mystically charged atmosphere. He denies the apparent virtuosity of his technique by a mirror effect creating a complex game between the figures made with his right hand, and the ones created with his unskilled left hand. At the Russian Pavillion of the Venice Biennale in 2009 he showed the suite of watercolors “Victory over the Future” in which he imagined the world in the styles of different artistic movements, political ideologies and utopias. In the suite of new water colors from 2012 that we will present in Milano, he has imagined different gods watching over different parts and aspects of the world.
Pavel Pepperstein was born in 1966 in Moscow as son of artist Viktor Pivovarov and author Irina Pivovarova. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and has exhibited his work in numerous venues, among them at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and in 2009, “Berlin-Moscow” at the Gropius Bau in Berlin 2003, the San Paolo Biennale in 2004, the 1st (2005) and the 3rd Moscow Biennale in 2009. He has had solo shows at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1999, at Kunsthaus Zug in 1999 and 2002, at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in 2002, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2003, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel in 2006 and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver in 2007.