Vladimir Kupriyanov. Time Revisited

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the pop/off/art gallery are proud to announce the exhibition Vladimir Kupriyanov. Time Revisited. The retrospective project brings back to the national art scene the work of one of the greatest Soviet and Russian photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Vladimir Kupriyanov’s tremendous and brilliant contribution to Russian culture, as well as the significance of his figure, have remained largely overlooked and still requires conceptualisation. After his death in 2011,

Kupriyanov’s works virtually disappeared from exhibitions and from the attention of art theorists and historians. Time Revisited is the result of extensive work with the artist’s archive and an attempt to reconstruct his world. Kupriyanov’s artworks are consistently based on photographs, both his own and found. However, the possibilities of representation of photography (rather than the photography itself) are in the center of attention. The artist used various creative effects: reflection, illumination, division into parts, cropping, and superimposition of several layers imitating multi-exposure. Thus, the main core of his heritage are installations and photographic objects. This is the focus of Time Revisited.

The dramaturgy of the exhibition not so much follows the chronology of the artist’s oeuvre, but shows works according to the main themes and leading motifs: document-image, image-time, ornament, sublime historical experience. Overall, the display includes about 200 works by Kupriyanov, both iconic and widely known, and those exhibited for the first time. An important aspect of the project is the catalogue, featuring a conceptual text by Viktor Misiano and a number of capacious essays by Anastasia Kotelnikova on Vladimir Kupriyanov’s main works and series.

About the artist

Vladimir Kupriyanov (1954–2011) was born in Moscow. In 1976 he graduated from the Institute of Culture with a degree in theater directing. From 1984 to 2003 he was an associate professor at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. From 2007 he was a professor of the Art Photography Department at the Alexander Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. The artist died on 26 December 2011 in Moscow. Kupriyanov was one of the pioneers of the independent art scene of the 1980s–1990s. His individual artistic method developed in the circle of Dmitri Prigov, Andrei Monastyrsky, Rostislav Lebedev and others. Vladimir Kupriyanov created a totally novel approach to photography and its representation.