Igor Kopystiansky - The John L. Stewart Collection of Russian Contemporary Art London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Mezhkniga, Moscow; Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    The historical 1988 Sotheby’s Moscow auction was the turning point for Igor
    Kopystiansky who then moved to New York after being part of the unofficial
    art scene of Moscow since 1978. In Moscow he participated in the few exhibitions dedicated to unofficial art such as Art and Photography at the Center of Technical Aesthetics, Moscow in 1983, and Object-1 at Malaja Grusinskaja in 1987. After 1988, he participated in major group exhibitions around the world including the Venice Biennale Aperto in 1988, Documenta 11 and Russia!, the exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in 2006. His work has also been featured in various solo exhibitions such as at the Sprengel Museum of Hannover, Lisson Gallery in London and the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow and can be found in the permanent collections of some of the most prestigious museums around the world. “I’m interested in working with tradition and traditional forms of art. It’s very much about context and about history, about rewriting history and rewriting my own version of history. History for me is mythology, a selected version of the past reality. It’s also about the age-old use of art as a political, economical, ideological tool.(…) The paintings aren’t destroyed; they are just in play with all these problems, because destroying is like the continuation of creation.The process of restoration in historical paintings is like the opposite, the reversal, like a destruction of the original paintings.” (H. Kontova, “Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky – Through the Past Darkly”, Flash Art, October 1993, p.112)

414

Restored Painting #4

1987
Oil on canvas.
77 x 61 1/4 in. (195.6 x 155.6 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “I. Kopystianski 1987 [in English] Restored Painting -4 [in Cyrillic]” on the reverse.

Estimate
£35,000 - 45,000 ‡♠

The John L. Stewart Collection of Russian Contemporary Art

Collection
13 October 2007, 6pm
London