The AR series "Timur on Horseback" 1985
серия AR "Тимур на коне" 1985 г
"Тимур на коне" Весной 1985 года "Новые композиторы" - Валерий Алахов, Игорь Веричев и "Новые художники" - Евгений Козлов и Тимур Новиков - встретились в квартире молодого голландца Йохана, приехавшего в Ленинград оттянуться и пожить некоторое время. first published in Na Dne 16 / 2001, St. Petersburg |
"Timur on Horseback" In the spring of 1985 the "New Composers" Valery Alakhov and Igor Verichev, and the "New Artists" Evgenij Kozlov and Timur Novikov met at the home of the young Dutchman Johann, who had come to Leningrad for a certain period of time and rented a small appartment. Stimulated by food, wine and good company, they picked up felt-pens and started drawing on Johann's collection of Soviet propaganda posters. Like many foreigners, Johann had developed a taste for these exotic items, while the locals usually tried to ignore the huge amount of this mass production with its old-fashioned design and pathetic stereotype slogans (Peace For People) When Evgenij Kozlov took out his camera and started shooting, their joint artistic creation turned into a spontaneous happening, and the small, conventionally furnished room, into its stage. With a skimmer as stick, a pot as helmet, a lid as shield, they created postures resembling in their playful and elegant fights very much scenes from a joust of knights, but then, of course, they were carried along by the war cry of the "New Artists": E-E. And this "E-E", which along with "ASSA" stands for a whole epoch, just means "we are aggressive, but not destructive. Our aggression is the natural creative aggressiveness of artists, it denies the old and creates the NEW. It is fun, it is bold and it is real." It is interesting to look at the propaganda posters from this point of view. Where the party slogans convey the idea of a country in constant need of self-assertion ("Edinnaya Volya Narodov - MIR"), the physical and spiritual presence of the artists, provoked and caught by Evgenij Kozlov's camera, is a clear indication of their mental independence. When developing the film, carefully scratching with a scalpel or pencil into the still moist emulsion of the negative, Evgenij Kozlov metamorphosed this strength. With the new features he enlarges the sphere of communication of each individual artist, visualizing what he felt to be their spiritual counterpart. Evgenij Kozlov used a considerable part of the 33 photos of this series for graphic works and large paintings, such as "Terror to the Enemies", "When you start feeling muscles" and "Timur on Horseback". The latter became the catalogue cover of the first important international exhibition of "The New Artists" in Stockholm, in 1988. Hannelore Fobo, first version. Second version published in Na Dne 16, 2001 in Russian |
Last updated 11 June 2023 |