Georgiy Tryakhin-Bukharov

Collection of the Artist

Almaty, Cathedral Exhibition Hall, Road to the Temple, 1991
Perm, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Face of a Bride: Contemporary Art of Kazakhstan, 2012, p. 81, illustrated in colour

A master of assemblage, Georgiy Tryakin-Bukharov manages to combine the coarsest materials to convey the most delicate of messages. His studio is nothing less than a scrap yard. Parts of derelict machinery, old household appliances and unidentifiable metals lie around his sculptural creations, such as the robotic Nif-Nif (2008), a subject taken from Three Little Pigs, and the Rocking Horse (2002). The commonplace childhood fantasy characters are reinvented as frightening robotic monsters. What at first hand appears as a rather humorous play of materials, opens to an underlying social critique. These structures act as the superhumans of the future, engorged in consumerism and unnecessary hoarding of 'stuff'. At times, a Soviet bottle sticker or a piece of an old poster plastered on a disused record player, itself a stand in for a head, remind us that these are in fact not futurological phobias, but nothing other than the artist's commentary on the eternal human condition.

The Golden Ratio (1991) touches on the sensitive subject of religion. Large wooden panels are joined together in the perfect symmetry of a square. The mossy green colour of the panels and the almost burgundy brown of the large wooden frame is reminiscent of the ubiquitous park benches spread across the former USSR. Most likely Tryakhin-Bukharov disassembled one of them to make this piece. Enclosed between the panels is a delicate Russian Orthodox icon of Christ Pantocrator. The icon, itself a ready-made, is at the heart of this composition and its fragility is juxtaposed to the harshness of the material surrounding it.

This contrast, both tactile and metaphysical, raises numerous questions as to the place of religion in daily life. Created in 1991, the present work belongs to the significant breaking point of the Soviet atheist rule and the beginnings of spritual awakening in the newly independent republics. Golden Ratio's piercing historical relevance thus unveils Tryakhin-Bukharov's own search for purity in the brutality of the everyday. Visual expressions of a supreme idea have always been at the forefront of Orhodox iconography. In this work Tryakhin-Bukharov detaches the idea from its transformed reincarnation in the ideals of socialist realism and, through non-conformist avant-garde methods, restores it to the icon.