AMBIENCE XVII

Vladimir Kupriyanov

1954, Moscow, USSR, now Russia – 2011, Moscow, Russia)

In Memory of Pushkin, 1984

installation

Photographer and artist Vladimir Kupriyanov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Culture with a degree in theater directing, which to a great extent shaped his work. Each of his projects possesses an in-built drama, with its own inner logic and figurative style. Leading critics define Kupriyanov as a “historical artist,” and indeed, his whole body of work is to a certain degree connected with reflections on the historical matrix of the past. Kupriyanov’s first projects date from the 1980s, the decade when the state was dissolving and the energy of the Soviet project was spent. Here there is something curiously unexpected: Kupriyanov deliberately studies the world around him, distinctively documenting things that don’t seem to deserve the attention of a non-official artist of that era. In his Metro series, he takes viewers into the hidden, ageless world of the Moscow Metro, where the power of the Stalinist style is particularly apparent against the background of late Soviet people vanishing and reappearing. In the context of Kupriyanov’s study of modernity, of particular interest is the series Lyuberetsky Agricultural Machine Factory, in which the artist focused on heavy industry. Another of Kupriyanov’s textbook works, Do Not Cast Me Away From Your Presence (1989–1990), is an enormous photograph of workers taken from a factory wall newspaper. Kupriyanov, however, cut the photograph that forms the basis of the work into seven pieces—the workers were separated from one another. Space opened up between them, but the viewer notices that the separation was not smooth, and that the images of the people are literally falling apart. All of this illustrates Kupriyanov’s exceptional historical intuition; throughout the final Soviet decade he soberly documented the present from a historical perspective. In the series In Memory of Pushkin, he combined honor roll photographs of Soviet women with romantic lines by the great poet which are taught in schools (“Extinguished is the orb of day…”). It is difficult to say how ironic this project is. What is indisputable is the work’s grounding in Russian history—Kupriyanov subtly combines the ephemeral and the eternal, reconciling the recent past with the immutable and everlasting, which in the end creates a penetrating, nostalgic image.