🗓️January 27, 2012
6:00 -10:00 PM
FRANTS GALLERY SPACE
📍81 Wooster St, New York, NY 10012 USA
St. Petersburg Arts Project (NY) cordially invites you to attend the opening reception for the exhibition of works by Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov
ROMAN DREAMS
This exhibition of the St. Petersburg artists is a result of their three-month stay as fellows of Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund at the American Academy in Rome in 2010.
The luxurious abundance of marble and flying figures in Roman churches and cathedrals occasioned Ivan Govorkov to create a series of drawings Marble. “I am imbued with the museum figurative classics at the subconscious level. And this subconscious, devoid of goals or ideas, is revealed in my drawings”. The artist draws spontaneously and aimlessly, allowing his hand to glide over the paper on its own as if revealing the invisible. Several works by Ivan Govorkov from a different graphics series Arachne are, on the contrary, full of subjects from the mythology. The artist, who has spent so much of his life on the classic art, seems to reflect ironically on “excessiveness” of the baroque style.
Paintings by Elena Gubanova from her Roman series are somewhat different. There are many, way too many fragments, losses and corrosions, and yet this city preserves the entire integrity of European Civilization. Non-objective white volumes against the black background are also the marble – fragments of the sculptures that the time has transformed from “cosmos” to “chaos”. Nevertheless, these half-abstract forms manage to contain in them all the beauty and completeness of the original image.
And, finally, joint works by the artists from their series Celestial Beings are also dedicated to the classic art.
The scientific theory or hypothesis not only unites all the facts, but also uncovers an unexpected connection between the phenomena that would appear to be independent. Ivan Govorkov uses the topological space of Moebius as an illustration or a sign in his theory of creation and offers an imaginative perception of the cosmos through the geometry in art. The artist is convinced that everything around us – the anatomy of living things, global ocean flux, space-time structure and the Universe – have a form of the unilateral surface.
In their series Celestial Beings, Ivan Govorkov and Elena Gubanova have united images of the mythological heroes of classic art and the topological space of a unilateral surface. They suggest that the viewer return to the ancient view of the world in which geometry and art were capable of describing the entire Universe.
Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov are members of the Artists’ Union. They are participants of numerous museum and gallery exhibits both in Russia and abroad. Their works are in many museums and private collections in Russia (including the State Hermitage and the State Russian Museum) as well as in the museums and private collections of the United States and Europe. Ivan Govorkov is a full professor at the Academy of Art in St. Petersburg.
