THREE NEW PROJECTS OF SERGIY ZARVA
18.03.10 - 11.04.10

At last Kyiv will get to know who of the gallery owners is to be honored -Zarva is building a huge board of honor with grotesque portraits of all Kyiv and Moscow gallery owners: from Marat Guelman to Ludmyla Bereznytska. He repaints the covers of the old "Ogonek" magazines and closes them with icon (!) casings, repaints huge deer horns into red color and puts them over idyll swimming-pool on the 6 m large canvas. In the "Family album" the author cut a lot of family photos to create a panorama collage - a grotesque clot of collective passion, a frozen grimace of a folk doomed to everyday routine... for what he got punched by his own relatives, whose photos he used. According to the words of art-critic Olexandr Solovyov, Olexandr is faithful to his inventions, with the help of which he became famous from the times of group exhibition "Beyond the Graphic", which took place in Odessa Art Museum in summer of 1998, where the photography was the basis for "paper" works. Or more exactly it was a big cycle of traditional family photos which the artist transformed beyond recognition by painting over in the traditions of expressionism and varnishing. It was an original version of a modern intermediary popular print.
Sergiy Zarva, the author of the projects: "Grotesque and mockery - are always present in my works. It's my attitude to art. To everything. I don't think that art is, frankly speaking, something serious. That in this moment it can give somebody something, show, explain. I don't see it anyway ".
Up to this day Zarva doesn't betray his founded method - photography lays in the basis of all of his works, multi-layered and vividly deformed (sometimes till the appearance of hyper-real effect) images-matrixes. For the first time the "Ogonek" theme appeared on the exhibition "PlayOgonekBoy" that took place in well-known Moscow gallery "Regina" , where the portraits of soviet people were shown upon the real rare covers of the magazine (editions of the 50s and 60s) for the first time. Appealing to the manner that reminds the painting of Pavlo Filonov, Sergiy Zarva cardinally changes the primary images and shows something heroic as disgusting but very expressive.
Into the modern history Zarva got with a big canvas "Disco" that in the same time looks like comics and monumental graffiti: the artist is not satisfied only with irony and uses a cruel sarcasm, transforming the long-legged models into monsters or wolverines, or drowned women. And as a result its anti-glamour is changing into simple trash… Last year the grotesque portrait of Julia Timoshenko "Julya", who was persistently cutting of her braid, was nearly the center art piece of the exposition of the international fair "ART-MOSCOW 2009" on the 3 Moscow biennale.
The exhibition opening will take place on the 18th of March, as usual on Thursday at 19.00 at the address: Kyiv, vyl. Pankivska, 8, Collection Gallery. More information, commentaries and reproductions you can get from Daryna Zholdak, the director of Collection Gallery on zholdak@collectiongallery.com.ua or zholdak@gmail.com or by tel.: 067 401 12 01