EXHIBITION



03.03.2021 - 05.04.2021
ABOUT
New exhibition by Igor Ponosov opens March 2, 2021 in Syntax Gallery.

The Participant Observation project defines Ponosov as a researcher of the urban environment, where his role is not limited to recording phenomena but extends to active participation in producing an alternative view of the city. This is reflected in the artist's appropriation of urban objects, his rethinking of Moscow's 'construction aesthetics' through photography and bodily practices. This approach makes Ponosov a 'participant observer', a part of the everyday life he constructs, the fragments of which are displayed in the show at Syntax Gallery.

The show encompasses the results of the artist's long-standing study comprising a series of observation photographs and artefacts removed from the urban environment, which have been processed into collages and objects.


'Igor Ponosov has succeeded in being a city underground worker. Not that he stopped being one, but he has certainly discovered a poetic dimension to his work and decided to ignore following a well-structured plan, embarking on a journey into the sea of randomness under the sails of intuition instead.
According to the artist, he has been experimenting with urban materials, staging body interactions with objects, and examining architecture through mimicry since the mid-2010s. Ponosov cut out fragments of building wraps and turned them into paintings or used them in everyday life, e.g. like curtains. As a professional prosthetist, he replaced missing pieces of the house and wrapped street sculpture in a special, fragmentary, manner or became part of the brickwork, billboards, or murals himself, merging with the cityscape. Yet he did that without disappearing completely – on the contrary, buildings became an extension of the artist, his natural costume of sorts – wings, legs, tail – decidedly not "I am for the city" but rather "the city is for me."'

Sergey Guskov
Art critic, journalist
EXHIBITION
VIEWS
VIDEO
Igor Ponosov «Participant Observation»
ARTIST
Igor Ponosov
Igor Ponosov (b. 1980) is a Moscow-based artist, curator and researcher, co-founder of the Partizaning movement, author of books on urban art and recipient of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art's grant for young artists (2012–13) and the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award (2016).