Anna Nova Gallery is pleased to participate in the contemporary art fair IcatalogI from April 12 to 14. The gallery's stand presents new bronze sculptures by Denis Patrakeev, paintings by Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, graphics and objects by Aljoscha.
In the series 'The Creation of Handwriting' (2024), Denis Patrakeev strives for poetry of material and form, reflecting on immortality seen through time. Each bronze sculpture is based on unique casts of thawing on icy water bodies artificially created by the artist. Thus, Patrakeev immortalizes a moment in bronze that will not be repeated again, demonstrating the intangible through the matter of nature.
In his new paintings, Ilya Fedotov-Fyodorov also turns to water as a form-shaping element. The artist washes out the color pigment on the canvases with the help of a directed stream of water jet. Thematically, Fedotov-Fedorov continues to explore subjects that have long interested him — strangeness, otherness, overcoming the anthropocentric paradigm in fine art, and borderline states. The central image in the works is either a man in the mask of an animal, or an animal in the mask of a man — a kind of "creature" .
In the works there is a clear reference to the poetics of surrealism, a current trend in contemporary art. For the first time, the stand presents the painting series ‘Portraits without Organs’ (2022) and ‘Family Portrait’ (2022), as well as the series’ The Plant Reigns’ (2018), which criticizes the process of museification and deconstruction of natural scientific language.
The intense pink and pastel color of Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov's works are supported by chamber sculptures by German artist Aljoscha, who explores the visual possibilities of synthetic biology and bioethics in his practice. He develops an aesthetics of organic life of the future, calling it by the author's term "bioism". According to these concepts, in the future the artist will make more use of living matter, constructing new forms of life. In the present, Aljoscha creates biofuturistic objects in acrylic and oil that resemble extraterrestrial organisms, and his elaborate drawings become their prototypes.
