21/24: Vladimir Kupriyanov - OUTLINES

The photographer Vladimir Kuprianov was born in 1954. In 1976 he graduated from the Institute of Culture as a theatre director. He served in the Soviet Army in 1976-77. Since 1984 he has been a senior lecturer at the Institute of Printing.

His first personal exhibition was held in the editorial offices of Construction Gazette in 1983. Over the last 10 years he has held more than 15 personal exhibitions in Moscow, Berlin, Graz, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Frankfurt, London, and Paris, and more than 45 group exhibitions in Russia, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Austria, Poland, Finland, South Korea, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, France and Spain. These include exhibitions at the Russian State Museum, the Georges Pompidou Centre, MIT Visual Art Center, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Zacheta Gallery of Modern Art, and the Shkola, Ridzhina, New Collection and Carre Noir galleries, among others.

“When still just underpainted, a face is actually something abstract. When the underpainting [sankir] dries out, then the facial contours, both external and internal, are run through with paint, that is they are transformed from abstractness to the first degree of clarity, so that the face obtains the first delineation of its features. These coloured lines are called outlines". (P. A. Florensky. Iconostasis. 1922) Exactly 80 years ago, at the height of the campaign to remove and destroy icons, Pavel Florensky painted his Iconostasis, in which he tried to resolve the problem of uniting two worlds – the visible and the invisible, the mountains and the valleys. According to Florensky, the place for uniting the two worlds is a church, and in a church there is an iconostasis, the altar barrier. “Heaven from earth, the mountains from the valleys, the altar from the church may only be separated by visible witnesses of the invisible world – living symbols of the union of the one and the other.…”

Light in a photographer’s work, albeit the subject of photography – is no less iconic than it is portraying life. In the actual photographic outlines of neglected churches there is a hidden drama of erosion of ‘living stones’ in the iconostasis, which thins out the altar coverings – the reverse process of the multi-layered church paintings. The ascent up Jacob’s ladder from the world to the heavens has gone backwards. The hand- made screens on which yesterday were projected images, not made by man, of the other world, disappear from our life. Walls peel, paint flakes off, and reality splits up into layers. Many of Kuprianov’s works are multi-layered, but it is in this plane series of photographs that layering appears in its divine quality.” (Yu. Avvakumov)