Sergey Rozhin
I, Rozhin
16+
Triangle Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Sergey Rozhin’s works, «I, Rozhin».
The exhibition includes a collection of the artist's drawings, paintings, collages and assemblage art, as well as excerpts of Rozhin’s installations since 2010. The exhibition demonstrates how Rozhin explores different methods of communicating with his audience, the artist aspiring to act as a mediator of “«chaos, bullsh*t reality and romance», adopting trash aesthetics and «trash conceptualism».
Sergey Rozhin was born in 1988 in Yekaterinburg. Rozhin’s works reflect everything from: Ural landscapes, painting a lyrical image of the Russian hero, life in concrete block estates whilst looking through the window to the outside, local hip-hop and Russian gangster aesthetics, aliens and the cosmos. The drawings chronicle these scenes, alongside social and cultural events and recent legislative changes. A homage to caricature mimics the graphic style of «Funny Pictures» magazine during the late Soviet period, or the satirical cartoons of tabloid newspaper «Moscow Komsomol» in post- Soviet Russia.
The artist pays tribute to the great 19th and 20th century Russian writers and musicians, including Pushkin, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Letov, Bashlachev and Bodrov. However, Rozhin simultaneously places himself within contemporary art discourse. Rozhin engages with the world around him, as well as turning internally to analyse his own mistakes, overcome professional insecurities and in turn create work that is purposefully ‘bad’, in a way that remains taboo for modernists, conceptualists and many other artists.
The artist's works incorporate obscurantist nu-collage, naive art based on found objects, and attempts to rework traditional materials, circumventing self-identified theoretical, academic and technical limitations. Through raw transparency about the artist and works’ limitations, weaknesses are transformed into strengths.
Taking the thorny path may require overcoming greater obstacles, but offers the potential for greater and sweeter victories. Treasured discoveries include the legendary music video for rapper Babangida,and «Ninja Turtles», who overcame social apathy typical of urban degradation, successfully engaging the public in producing art and pranks about stolen artworks in Yekaterinburg, later broadcast on the Moscow-based TV channel, NTV. As such, a reality of crippling anxiety and feelings of hopelessness is transformed into a colourful caricature, altered through stubborn Ural romanticism.
Sergey Rozhin is a millennial artist from Yekaterinburg. Rozhin graduated from the Ural Federal University with a degree in Engineering, and participated in the third Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art. Solo exhibitions of Sergei Rozhin’s work have taken place across Russia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and the Netherlands. The artist's works have also been presented at PG Art Gallery in Istanbul, the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, the Ural regional department of the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg among others. A selection of Rozhin’s works can be found in the permanent collection of the Yekaterinburg Gallery of Contemporary Art alongside private collections in Russia and internationally.
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