Ivan Chuikov

(Russian, born 1935)

Seven studies for 'Variants', 1978 each: 8 x 13cm (3 1/8 x 5 1/8in). (unframed)

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by a private European collector
Thence by descent


Variants is a series of 12 works created by Ivan Chuikov in 1978 in which the same photographic image of a sea scape was used as a support for application of a variety of graphic and painterly techniques. The contrast of a of black and white image and the colourful application of hand painted pigments creates the effect of the duality of the space – a theme central to Chuikov's entire oeuvre. The present seven studies in pencil and crayon preserve the concept of the interplay of the spaces – realistic and illusional, - while the medium grants the studies a highly emotive and gestural quality.


"All my works... in one way or another, originate primarily from the surprise experienced by the very fact of an image, by the ability to depict something on a flat sheet, to create an illusion ... In the series 'Variants,' the same photograph of a seascape was used with various images of a very eclectic and different stylistic nature applied over it. Photography as one of the conventional systems of representation is so familiar that it is automatically and instantly being overcome by the viewer. And not existing in this way in a real space, it becomes the reason for immersion in the illusory space. The collision of this system – the photographical with the pictorial one - on one plane, it seems to me, allows you to return everything to a real space, to demonstrate the conditionality of the image in general, while preserving the image itself," - Ivan Chuikov (quoted in Ivan Chuikov, com. L. Mashuk, Moscow, 1998).