Sergei Sherstiuk

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Sergei Sherstiuk: Soviet Post Socialist Realism, Jersey City, N.J.: C.A.S.E. Museum of Contemporary Russian Art, 1990
Constance Schwartz, 20^th Century Russian Art: The Avant-Garde Years; The Glasnost Years, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, 1992, p. 69, a related work illustrated
Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 356
Alla Rosenfeld and Norton Dodge, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp. 155-156

Acrylic on original canvas. The surface is very slightly dirty and coated with a light layer of varnish. There are some minor scuffs and scratches, including a small mark to the right of the signature. A couple minor flakes of paint have been lost to the outer edges, but the work is in overall good state. Under UV the work appears untouched. Held in a modern wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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A pioneering Hyperrealist (using the Russian term), Sergei Sherstiuk received his artistic training at the Shevchenko Art Institute in Kiev. As the artist later recalled, "Our training was so precise that you learned to draw even a minute speck in an eye." Part of the younger, somewhat rebellious generation of Soviet artists that came to maturity in the 1970s, Sherstiuk chose to explore the inner world of his subjects rather than adhere to the tenets of Socialist Realism. That inner world was private, ambiguous, and lacking in precise meaning. In comparison to Photorealist works, which record both the surface effects of photographs and the commonplace look of things, Sherstiuk's are intended to reach literally and figuratively beyond surface appearances, that is, beyond the concrete and the objective.

Around 1990, he began to depict individuals posed in confrontational scenes, often while playing cards. Perhaps because of the new sense of freedom brought about by the fall of the Soviet system, Sherstiuk occasionally let his figures express their feelings much more openly, sometimes violently. Several aspects of these works—their precise and complicated placement of forms, the figures' physical gestures within shallow spaces, and the kinds of theatrical lighting employed in the scenes—suggest that Sherstiuk had been studying the paintings of Caravaggio or other seventeenth-century Italian artists. But the results look quite contemporary because he dressed the figures in modern clothing and rendered the baroque stylings in his hyperrealistic style.