EXHIBITION
ABOUT
Dmitry Bulnygin’s exhibition While the Lake Is Frozen immerses us into the exploration of stasis—a paralyzing state that extends to nature, society, and human mind. Complex sculptures and objects made of metal, ceramics, wood, and fabric are arranged by the artist as if frozen in time—like a tableau where each element exists in its own shadow, staying still but still there. Bulnygin crafts lifelike plants out of metal, a goddess from old furniture and seashells, and a two-headed piglet as a nod to the Stalinist era, juxtaposing the dead and the living, the hard and the soft, the sad and the comical in an estranged rhyme.
The series of objects Winter Herbarium, reminiscent of dried plants, welds the space together. These “dead” flowers appear sharp and cold, resembling weapons. Fragile turns into durable, which looks almost threatening.
Bulnygin’s new objects are like archaeological artifacts, lurking in icy silence. They form a frozen world of surreal objects which resist capture and lend themselves only to the simple enumeration. Here are rare signs of a thaw: melting leaden buildings and relics of obsolete utilitarian architecture. Over there a ceramic parrot, draped in the khaki cloth, is frozen in ambiguous anticipation. Nearby, a two-headed piglet balances on the antique pedestal, defying all laws of physics and logic.
This whimsical winter landscape is centred around Marena, the Slavic goddess of winter and death, embodying the cycle of withering and rebirth. This anthropomorphic headless figure rests on plumpy piglet legs, adorned with a jester’s leopard-print cap and clad in armor made of mussel shells. She has an overturned, pseudo-Empire-style nightstand as a body. Marena demands human sacrifices—preferably young ones—which explains why the nightstand is full of fingers with colourful nail polish. Indeed the sinister charm of the sculpture has a distinctly cartoon quality, and, as is often the case with Bulnygin, the macabre becomes humorous. After all, winter doesn’t last forever; it becomes apparent if one acquires the art of cold estrangement.
The series of objects Winter Herbarium, reminiscent of dried plants, welds the space together. These “dead” flowers appear sharp and cold, resembling weapons. Fragile turns into durable, which looks almost threatening.
Bulnygin’s new objects are like archaeological artifacts, lurking in icy silence. They form a frozen world of surreal objects which resist capture and lend themselves only to the simple enumeration. Here are rare signs of a thaw: melting leaden buildings and relics of obsolete utilitarian architecture. Over there a ceramic parrot, draped in the khaki cloth, is frozen in ambiguous anticipation. Nearby, a two-headed piglet balances on the antique pedestal, defying all laws of physics and logic.
This whimsical winter landscape is centred around Marena, the Slavic goddess of winter and death, embodying the cycle of withering and rebirth. This anthropomorphic headless figure rests on plumpy piglet legs, adorned with a jester’s leopard-print cap and clad in armor made of mussel shells. She has an overturned, pseudo-Empire-style nightstand as a body. Marena demands human sacrifices—preferably young ones—which explains why the nightstand is full of fingers with colourful nail polish. Indeed the sinister charm of the sculpture has a distinctly cartoon quality, and, as is often the case with Bulnygin, the macabre becomes humorous. After all, winter doesn’t last forever; it becomes apparent if one acquires the art of cold estrangement.
ARTIST
Dmitry Bulnygin (b. 1965) graduated from the Novosibirsk Architectural Institute in 1990, founded the International Extra Short Film Festival (ESF) in 2000, was a member of the Blue Noses art group in 1999-2004. Since 2013 Bulnygin has been creating video installations using video mapping technology, whereas 2016 saw the start of work on a series of sculptures. Lives and works in Paris and in the forest of Sainte Assise, France.
