Sergey Bratkov
An image from Misanthrope, SERGEY BRATKOV‘s previous exhibition in this gallery, is his starting point for new work in which he depict his native Ukraine. This new work is what makes up Male Games, his third exhibition at Espacio Minimo. More of his new panoramic works in the gallery at the end.
The exhibition shows a selection of large format panoramic photographs in the gallery’s first room, with the remaining images in the series being projected in the basement room. Through these images BRATKOV performs a narrative journey through contemporary Ukraine, capturing the country’s unusual and surreal beauty with no recourse to digital manipulation, thus showing the real transformation it has gone through in recent years.
With this work the artists shows the cultural and economic changes that have occurred in Ukraine. Through personal stories, and without abandoning his previous works’ characteristic sense of humor, he documents its specific reality and the peculiarity of its inhabitants.
The show is completed with a projection in the gallery’s main space of the video Endless War, a powerful metaphor of the other male “game” which, via an endless video loop, the artist uses to make a powerful political comment. The emptiness of the soldiers’ helmets, loudly hitting against the floor, makes evident the absence of human forms, giving the images a simultaneous feeling of nostalgia and absurdity.
SERGEY BRATKOV (Kharkov, Ukraine, 1960) Lives and works in Moscow. From 1970 to 1978 he studied at Repin Art
College in Kharkov, and from 1978 to 1983 he attended the Polytechnic Academy in the same city. From 1994 to 1997 he
was a part of the Fast Reaction Group along with Boris Mikhailov, Vita Mikhailova and Sergey Solonsky. He represented Russia in the 50th and 52nd Venice Bienale, at the 25th Sao Paulo Bienal, at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, and at the first two exhibits in Moscow. He has had solo shows at important museums and public institutions such as Kunstverein Rosenheim in Rosenheim (Germany, 2002), Centre for Contemporary Art in Kiev (Ukraine, 2003), S.M.A.K. Museum de Gante (Belgium, 2005), Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (Russia, 2006), Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (United Kingdom, 2007), Fotomuseum Winterthur in Winterthur (Switzerland, 2008) and Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev (Ukraine, 2010) as well as being part of distinguished collective shows in museums, institutions, and art center across the world.
