Sergei Sapozhnikov

Artist, photographer, curator. Born in Rostov-on-Don (1984). Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of the Southern Federal University (formerly Rostov State University) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, where he took the course on “New Artistic Strategies” (2009).

Sergei Sapozhnikov began as a graffitist and has partially transferred the atmosphere of street art into his photographs. Although artistically conceived works of art, his photographs do not aspire towards beauty and aestheticism. On the contrary, the artist sometimes deliberately creates the effect of pollution of the composition.

Sapozhnikov reactivates the Baroque heritage in his projects. He transfers the devices of the Baroque into the realms of photography. His works are characterised by the flatness of the depicted image, the exchange of the colour textures, dynamism, Baroque excess, almost grotesque compositions and absurd actions and postures. Volumetric reality is transformed by the lens into a planar collage, while the models intermingle with the background, literally dissolving into it.

At the same time, the living features (the people) in Sapozhnikov’s photographs become an integral part of the composition, turning into a nature-morte. Pausing at the moment when the photo is taken, they freeze in the frame, like a Dutch seventeenth-century still-life. The frozen fragments of human figures protruding from the background, bodies neither alive nor dead, recall Foucault’s belief that “modern man is an animal whose politics call his existence as a living being into question.”

“The development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak, created the ‘docile bodies’ that it needed.” Summarising the key points of Foucault’s theory, this quotation from Agamben makes us take a fresh look at the “docile bodies” – bending, contorting and adopting clearly uncomfortable poses – in the photographs of Sergei Sapozhnikov.

The close similarity between Sapozhnikov’s photographs and works of painting is explained by the unusually bright gamut of colours. The artist’s long and time-consuming post-production results in the “sublimation” of the colourist component of the photograph. The richly coloured frames live, despite the absence of any plotline or rational motivation, as pulsars, whose signals are not intended to be decoded, but simply indicate their own existence. Colour is likened to a fluid and plastic substance, with which the artist fills his structures, like a transfusion of donor blood.