Svetlana Kopystiansky

Sale: Sotheby's, Moscow, July 7, 1988

Moscow, Hammer Center, Sotheby's First Sale of Russian Art, 1988 (traveling exhibition)
Connecticut, Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art, Exhibition of Russian Art

Verbal and visual elements play roles of equal importance in the work of Svetlana Kopystiansky. The basis of many of Kopystiansky's works is a literary text that has been painted or otherwise inserted onto the canvas. Kopystiansky uses a range of texts, both classic and contemporary. In every case what is most important is that the text is "found"--it was not written by the artist but by someone else. Kopystiansky's texts have been taken and rewritten by hand from novels, short stories, and Russian plays. Literary passages or fragments by various authors are at times combined in the artist's "folded" works.

In this work, the meaning of the original text was destroyed by the folding process; words and sentences often almost completely disappear into the folds of the canvas, transforming the text into a mass of color in which only a few fragments can be deciphered. The folding produced a new text, one created by chance. Its visible fragments can still be read, although they have become a meaningless combination of words and sentences. In this way, Kopystiansky's works are connected to the tradition of OBERIU, a group of Leningrad-based absurdist writers of the 1920s-1930s known for their embrace of total irrationality, irony, and black humor.

Kopystiansky has described her use of fabric and its transformative role in the creation of her folded paintings: "I work directly with the material and exploit its specific physical characteristics...I produce objects...whose material is freely arranged in various large folds. In this way the original form of the text is changed, and the new form gives rise to a new sequence of letters and signs" (Svetlana Kopystianskaya, "Artist's statement," June 1, 1988, in Eva and Lothar C. Poll, SZENE MOCKBA: Vier Künstler--Vier Positionen, p. 60).