Artists

		Artworks: Click here
		SHURAVLEV Anatoly

Biographical information: 1963 born in Moscow
Lives in Moscow and Berlin.
Collections where works are held
Participation in exhibitions and auctions: SOLO EXIBITIONS:

2008 Unnamed. GMG Gallery, Moscow
Black Holes. Urs Meile Gallery, Luzern-Beijing
2007 China Connection. Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, China
2006 Anatoly Shuravlev. Gallery Charim, Vienna, Austria
2005 Infrathin.1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Contemporary City Foundation, Moscow
Anatoly Shuravlev. Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland
Anatoly Shuravlev. Marina Gizich Gallery, Saint-Petersburg
2004 Retrospective. Museum “Moscow House of Photography”, Moscow
2003 Anatoly Shuravlev. Aidan Gallery, Moscow
2002 Anatoly Shuravlev. Charim Gallery, Vienna, Austria
Anatoly Shuravlev. Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland
Anatoly Shuravlev. Aidan Gallery, Moscow
2001 Templates, Gary Tatinsian Gallery. New York
Anatoly Shuravlev. Otto Schweins Gallery, Cologne, Germany
2000 Anatoly Shuravlev. Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland
1999 Anatoly Shuravlev. Aidan Gallery, Moscow
1998 History. Labor Pixel Grain, Berlin
Hand Made. Otto Schweins Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1997 Templates. Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland
Flowers of Moscow. Aidan Gallery, Moscow
1995 Anatoly Shuravlev. La Base, Centre d`Art Contemporain, Levallois, Paris
Anatoly Shuravlev. Show Room Specks Hof, Leipzig, Germany
Anatoly Shuravlev. Otto Schweins Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1994 Anatoly Shuravlev. Sammlung Rene Steiner, Erlach, Switzerland
Ab Realibus ad Realiora, Kunstwerke, Berlin, Germany; State Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg
1993 Attempt to See, Galerie im Literaturforum Brecht-Ilaus, Berlin, Germany
1992 Anatoly Shuravlev. The Senate of Berlin, Berlin
Anatoly Shuravlev. Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
Anatoly Shuravlev. Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin, Italy

GROUP EXIBITIONS:

2009 “VICTORY OVER THE FUTURE” - Russian Pavilion Project La Biennale di Venezia
Excuse me, are you famous? WL project, Berlin –Hong Kong
2008 Summer Sale. GMG Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Moscow. Volker Dill Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2007 GMG Space. GMG Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Collection of DZ BANK. Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary
Through the Painting. 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow
Collection of Pier Broche. Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
2006 Artist Against the State: Perestroika Revisited. Ronald Feldmann Gallery, New York, USA
2005 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
Hier/anderswo. Kunstpanorama, Lucerne, Switzerland
2004 Shizorama. National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow
Na Kurort!, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, German, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow
Collection of DZ Bank. Museum “Moscow House of Photography”, Moscow
2003 Landscape. Virginia Miller Gallery, Miami, USA
Group Show. Charim Gallery, Vienna, Austria
2002 Present Tense, Bard College Museum, New York, USA
Trazit. Rene Steiner Gallery, Erlach, Switzerland
New Models. Trafo Center for Contemporary art, Budapest, Hungary
2001 Group Show. Virginia Miller Gallery, Miami, USA
2000Through the Looking Glass. Gallery Fricke, Berlin and Dusseldorf, Germany
BMA. Position New Art from Berlin. Neuer Kunstverein, Aschaffenburg, Germany
Perce? Domus Academy Milan and Magazzino d`Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy
1999-2001 After the Wall, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Museum Ludwig, Budapest, Hungary, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany
Can You Hear Me? Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art, State Gallery
in Sophienhof, Kiel, Germany; Center for Contemporary Art, Vilnius,
Lithuania; Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock, Germany; Bergen’s Kunstforening,
Bergen, Norway; Gallery Otso, Espoo, Finland
1999 Missing Link, Kunstmuseum Bern, Berne, Switzerland and Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany
Zwischenformen aktueller Kunst, Freunde aktueller Kunst e. V., Zwickau, Germany
SPACE PLACE 30049-180799. Kunsthalle Tirol, Hall, Austria
Children of Berlin. P. S. 1 Museum for Contemporary Art, New York
1997 Kabinet. A Contemporary Artists Magazine, Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mystical Correct. Galerie Hohenthal & Bergen, Berlin
1996 Almost Invisible, Ehemaliges Umspannwerk, Singen, Germany
1995 Landschaft. Mit dem Blick der 90er Jahre, Mittelrhein-Museum, Koblenz;
Museum Schloss Burgk, Saale and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
Das Medium der Photographie in der zeitgenossischen Kunst, Galerie Dacic, Tubingen, Germany
Kunst im Verborgenen. Nonkonformisten Russland 1957-1995, Tsaritsino
Museum, Moscow; Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafenam- Rhein;
Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Staatliches Museum Lindenau, Altenburg, Germany
Configura 2. Dialog der Kulturen, Erfurt, Germany
Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France
Kraftemessen. Zeichnungen der Moscauer Szene, Galerie Hohenthal & Littler, Munich, Germany
1994 Kunst: Sprache, Kunstwerke, Berlin
Renaissance and Resistance, Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg
Cetinjski Bijenale II, Cetine, Montenegro
XXII Biennale di Sao Paolo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Engel Heute. Galerie Gottfried Hafemann, Wiesbaden, Germany
1993 Philosophy of the Name. National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow
Privat. Kunstwerke, Berlin
Without Trace. Altes Rathaus, Potsdam, Germany
1992 Perspectives of Conceptualism. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, USA
37 Raume. Kunstwerke, Berlin
The Fall. The One and the Other. Immo Art Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
A Mosca... a Mosca..., Villa Campoleto, Ercolano and Galleria Comunale
d`Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy
1991 In de USSR en Erbuiten", Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
1989-1990 10+10, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Albert Knox Gallery, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Fort Worth and Corcoran Gallery, Washington, USA
Autobiographical notes: No information available
What the critics say: Anatoly Shuravlev announced himself as one of the brighter personalities on the bubbling Moscow art scene at the end of the 80s with a renowned performance in which he voluntarily incarcerated himself inside an inflated polythene tube with a television set. Thus, by 1998, Shuravlev had already revealed his main aesthetic directions: an interest in the world of mass communication and researching problems of how reality is perceived. This is not reality as we feel it directly, but in an endless variety of other forms: from transparent film, imposing limits on reality and how the subject is perceived, to old photographs, whose interpretation depends, first and foremost, on the strands of cultural memory.
At the beginning of the 90s, Shuravlev made a series of photographic portraits of ancient heroes, created by superimposing transparencies with portraits of different figures. The resultant image was a new hyper-reality, corresponding more closely to our perception of history and distanced not only by the physical factor of time, but also by the cultural, historical and social myths, through whose prism we perceive history.
«History will be written by whoever is born last» – This line from Aleksei Pashchikov’s poem «Poltava» could be an epigraph for Anatoly Shuravlev’s series of «Impossible Photographs»: «Egypt at the end of the 18th Century, photography from 1992», «Rome during the time of Emperor Constantine, photography from 1996» and «Brazil at the beginning of the 19th Century, photography from 1995». These pieces of work were created on the basis of old prints made at a time when photography did not exist. All the same, the artist manages to achieve a photographic documentary effect through various re-photographing techniques and subtle re-working on a computer; this puts under doubt the very existence of the idea of «»objective evidence».
He takes a similar approach in the series «Apostles», creating photographic portraits on the basis of medieval wooden sculptures. As in «Impossible Photographs», Shuravlev continues in this series to dispel the myths behind the idea of photography as documentary evidence.
Later, using photography, the artist researched and de-sanctified our notions of the existence, meaning and purpose of painting. Having demonstrated the conditional nature of our ideas about the history of art, including the art of painting and photography, Anatoly Shuravlev has recently been analysing the transformation of our notions of reality in the age of mass communication. The conceptual articulacy of Anatoly Shuravlev’s work, coupled with its elegant and graceful sense of rhythm, enables us to speak of the artist’s creative work as a significant phenomenon in the development of contemporary Russian and European art.

Olga Sviblova

Anatoly Shuravlev is what you call a long-runner, someone who has been active in the field of contemporary art since the mid 1980s – and who has been moving back and forth between Berlin and his hometown Moscow for almost two decades now.
At the beginning, Anatoly was interested in the semiotic analysis of word and text. In paintings, objects, and installations of his early years he dealt with questions of "truth" and representation, of signifiant and signifié. Then, during the early 1990s, there was a major "shift" in his oeuvre and Anatoly started to work with photography – reflecting the definition of the image by the medium. For example, he photographed mid 19th century engravings which were produced during the first ethnological research trips of Western scientists to the historical sights of Egypt or the rain forest in Brazil. The artist processed them photo-technically and engraving disappeared in favour of a diffuse, "photographic" depiction of those places, taken at a time when the technical medium of photography did not exist ("Impossible Photography"). At the same time, the artist was aware of the ideological content of impressions foreign travellers received during their trips. In a sense, their depictions function as a portrayal of the "other". Anatoly Shuravlev. “Black Holes”.
Anatoly continued to investigate these aspects of the "politics of representation" in various other photo-based projects. Tiny c-prints with a size of 10 mm x 8 mm or with a diameter of 10 mm became one of his trademarks in this process. The small prints were mounted on plastic cubes and installed on a wall in huge amounts and various shapes. Usually the prints show imagery that the artist shot with his analogue camera from magazines, Anatoly Shuravlev. “Black Holes”. TV, film and the Internet. What one sees and can recognise in these tiny images remains speculation to some extent. Although we can identify certain celebrities, landscapes, objects or parts of human bodies, it is almost impossible to make precise statements about the photographic details. The perception of this particular body of work with tiny prints is not dissimilar to the process of watching television – it imitates the habit of zapping, when we perceive the image as a whole but can no longer refer to single details. In an abstract sense, this specific way of perceiving the artwork or the mediated world can be compared to our perception of the world. In his project "Black Holes" Anatoly deals with a similar topic and transfers the aspect of world perception into a confrontation of photography with painting. The work creates an all-over installation in the Anatoly Shuravlev. “Black Holes”. surrounding space that consists of specks of bleeding black paint applied to the walls in a formalistic way and reminiscent of the Action painting of the 1950s. When seen from a distance, the overall wall painting is perceived as an abstract structure that develops into some kind of universe, since it surrounds us on all four walls. When inspecting the walls closer, small circular 10 mm-diameter photographs come into sight in the centre of each speck of black paint, showing a variety of historical personae from Gandhi to Einstein, from Madonna to Obama, all the strange people that have changed the world. When enlarging the distance from the photographic object, the black paint specks function like cosmic black holes that let the photographs disappear in space through their rotating forces. In this sense Shuravlev creates a space that no longer appears as a whole but is only perceptible through details, a world that has the quality of a fractured universe rather than an integral cosmos.

Kathrin Becker
Bibliography: No information available

* - This information has been provided by the Soros Center for Contemporary

Request more information about artist