The gallery is pleased to present Arsen Savadov’s first solo exhibition in New York.

The artistic debut of Arsen Savadov, a Ukrainian artist, occurred at the end of the 1980’s. With the Soviet era not yet over, he joined an international movement that focused on a ‘return to painting’. Using aggressive colors, Savadov’s massive canvases from this period feature strange and hallucinatory subjects that are referential, irrational, hyper-visual and erotic. Critics referred to this work as Neo-Baroque (17th century Baroque is, in fact, associated with Ukrainian artistic tradition).

In the 1990’s, the Neo-Baroque imagination continued to influence Savadov while shifting medium from painting to interactive performance, video and other art forms. His photo-performances include Donbass Chocolate a photo series that pitches visions of sleek men in tutus in post-Soviet era mineshafts. They pose among real miners and all men are ghostly eyed, muscular and covered in coal dust. Another series incorporates fashion models wearing luxurious designer clothing and striking provocative poses in a Ukrainian cemetery. Most disturbing are the vamping poses set in front of real open casket, graveside funerals. The photo performances discuss class struggle, sociopolitical ideology, and issues of sexual identity, religion and the history of art.

In his current exhibition Savadov returns to the medium of painting as part of an ‘artistic alchemy’ – where painting, as a melting pot of medias, asserts itself as a means of expression for the artist once more. Continuing with the Neo-Baroque aesthetic and its sense of spectacle, these paintings embrace anti-realism with their elaborately embellished imagery. Through provocative sensual narratives and psychedelic rainbow colors, the viewers take part of a contemporary Bacchanalia feast.

As with his earlier work, the painterly canvases display visual overabundance, eroticism and a socio-political referentiality. In this body of work, the Neo-Baroque style does not represents an art movement but a cultural system. The paintings possess a ‘social aesthetic’ as they respond to the collapse of the symbolic order in contemporary society. As such, they symbolize a loss of totality and system in favor of flux and change.