(E-E) Ev.g.e.n.i.j ..K.o.z.l.o.     Berlin                                                  


      E-E Evgenij Kozlov: Exhibitions

"Save Yourself!"

curated by Shaun McDowell

works by Saul Adamczewski, Robert Crumb, Oliver Eales, Marie Jacotey,
(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Pavel Pepperstein, Rose Wylie.

Hannah Barry Gallery, London

June 26 – August 15, 2014



"... I’d love to meet Robert Crumb and Evgenij Kozlov.. ..." Shaun Mc Dowell talks to MK Palomar
Read the interview for "studio international" >>

"Save Yourself!" by Rye Dag Holmboe
The current exhibition of drawings at Hannah Barry Gallery takes its title from a work of the same name by Saul Adamczewski. ... read the text >>


Installation views. courtesy Hannah Barrry Gallery, 2014.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Дарю тебе I offer you  From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale" 29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, with a drawing and stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
Дарю тебе I offer you
From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale"
29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, with a drawing and stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.


"Save Yourself". Installation view with works by Marie Jacoty, Saul Adamczewski, Pavel Pepperstein, Oliver Eales (from left to right). Hannah Barry Gallery, 2014.

"Save Yourself!". Installation view with works by Marie Jacoty, Saul Adamczewski, Pavel Pepperstein, Oliver Eales (from left to right). Hannah Barry Gallery, 2014.


(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov  В ХХХХI веке люди будут. In the XXXI century people will. (Reverse) From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale" 29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
В ХХХХI веке люди будут. In the XXXI century people will. (Reverse)
From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale"
29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.


(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov E-E From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale" 29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.  Also availabe as inkjet print.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
E-E
From the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale"
29.6 x 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the reverse. 1982. 1997. 2007.
Also availabe as inkjet print.


Installion view. Left and right to the door: drawings by (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov from the series "Erras on the Way to School".

Installion view. Left and right to the door: drawings by (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov from the series
"Erras on the Way to School".


(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Ошибки в тихий час / Еrrors during the silent hour  From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Erras on the Way to School." 29.5 х 21 cm, blue crayon, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s. Also availabe as inkjet print.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
Ошибки в тихий час / Еrrors during the silent hour
From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Erras on the Way to School."
29.5 х 21 cm, blue crayon, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s.
Also availabe as inkjet print.


(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Ошибки учителницы рисования 7а класса / Еrrors of the art teacher of grade 7 From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Erras on the Way to School". 29.5 х 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
Ошибки учителницы рисования 7а класса / Еrrors of the art teacher of grade 7
From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Erras on the Way to School".
29.5 х 21 cm, mixed media, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s.


(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Ошибки учительницы математики / Errors of the maths teacher From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Errars on the Way to School"‚. 21 x 29.5 cm, blue crayon, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s. Also availabe as inkjet print.
(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov
Ошибки учительницы математики / Errors of the maths teacher
From the series "Ошипки по дороге в школу / Errars on the Way to School"‚.
21 x 29.5 cm, blue crayon, paper, stamped E-E on the front page, 1990s.
Also availabe as inkjet print.


more works from the series "E-E Skaska / E-E Fairy tale >>
"Save Yourself!" on the gallery's website >>



"SAVE YOURSELF!" by Rye Dag Holmboe


The current exhibition of drawings at Hannah Barry Gallery takes its title from a work of the same name by Saul Adamczewski. The drawing depicts the head of a bald man framed by a series of horizontal squiggles, signifiers of anxiety and a lack of psychological depth. Above this simply rendered figure, the words “SAVE YOURSELF” have been clumsily written in blue felt tip pen.

The exclamation functions as an umbrella term for the other works displayed, and Adamczewski’s drawing, in its mixture of crudity and caricatural angst, offers a summative expression of the exhibition’s leitmotif. If the seven artists exhibited share a particular concern, it is arguably an attempt to come to terms with the historical present and to explore the various symptoms intensified, if not produced, by life in a capitalist society. Addictions, anxieties, compulsions and perversions are addressed in ways that imply that these conditions are not simply subjective but socially mediated. Moreover, as the exhibition’s title suggests, these symptomatic forms of behaviour may be understood as ways of living in, and adapting to, an increasingly unliveable reality. As the psychiatrist R. D. Laing once put it, “insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”.

In a series of blue monochromatic drawings produced in the years shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, the Russian artist Evgenij Kozlov explores the impact of a nascent form of capitalism. In one drawing, Errors during the silent hour, a winged sailor with a large erection stands to attention. Beneath him two women look up, their gazes focused on his virile member. The work is populated by symbols of consumer culture—a record, cigarettes, makeup, the hairdo—as well as unusual objects such as a brass bell and a military star. In another drawing, Errors of the maths teacher, a mathematics student is seen examining the rear parts of a female teacher wearing a pair of lacy stockings. Around them are a series of fractional equations and the measuring tools used in arithmetic.

Both of the works in question may be understood as examples of what Kozlov terms “Chaose art”, where artworks are composed through methods of assemblage with no prior sketch or idea to guide the artist. As in the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, each work develops from element to element, from figure to figure, leading to what Kozlov describes as “bright meaninglessness”. Yet what is particularly striking about these works is the skill with which they have been rendered and what appears to be, paradoxically perhaps, a complete lack of spontaneity (one critic has aptly termed this style “a new wave classical aesthetic”).[1]

In the first work described above, the three figures are triangulated, the sailor’s halo serving as an apex, while perspectival markers indicate the lines of sight of the two female figures. Meanwhile, the second drawing see above >> seems to be a direct (if initially unplanned) quotation of Albert Dürer’s famous woodcut Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Woman (1525), in which a male figure is seen examining a corpulent woman through a grid or ‘perspective machine’. Dürer’s woodcut suggests that the bodily and, by extension, the contingent, can be rationalised and objectified through mathematical schema. Likewise, the various instruments and fractional equations scattered around Kozlov’s drawing may be read as signifiers of modern rationality. On this view, both works are not only self-reflexive exercises about the process of drawing, but sardonic commentaries on the impact of consumer culture and the rationalisations of capitalism, as well as the repressed sexual energies that underlie them.

A similar sense of repression and perversion is encountered in a drawing by R. Crumb, a cartoonist famous for countercultural characters such as Fritz the Cat and Mr Natural. As is often the case with Crumb’s work, Mystic Funnies (1994)—an original drawing designed as the cover of a comic book of the same name—offers a sharp satire of contemporary culture.

The scene, set in a car park, depicts cock-nosed perverts ogling a corpulent woman who steadfastly ignores their advances. As the exhibition’s curator Shawn McDowell pointed out in conversation, Crumb’s work reverses the gender hierarchies prevalent in comic books. Rather than an objectified woman, here the male figures find themselves objectified by the dumb insistence of their own gazes. Sexual objectification has been turned inside out, so to speak, in the fulfilment of its own logic. A comparable sense of self-alienation is encountered in another work by Crumb titled Self-Loathing Comics #1 (cover), a self-portrait in which the artist depicts himself as a grotesque figure surprised and disgusted by the reflection he encounters in a mirror.

The British artist Marie Jacotey’s works also address the fractured nature of experience. A series of small, tile-sized drawings depict a variety of female figures in different situations. Each work has been drawn in coloured pencil on plaster. This lends the works a particularly sensual quality, one that is encapsulated by the process of making itself: the satisfying sense of pencil crumbling as it covers the surface of soft, porous plaster. The series of drawings is displayed in a row, which makes the viewer feel voyeuristic, as if moving from window to window, peering in. The images themselves are of a quietly disturbing nature. Even if most of the works do not display any violence as such—except one, in which a female figure clutches her bleeding neck—in each drawing there is an uncanny contrast between surface placidity and implicit violence. In one work a woman is seen nose-deep in a pool of pale blue, gazing out towards the viewer in such a way that she seems both predatory and haunted. In another a seated woman leans over the body of a man in bed, and the viewer is left to guess whether he is alive or dead, and why.

Also exhibited are the works of Oliver Eales, an artist best known for his anarchistic and energetically painted graffiti murals. The works displayed, which are perhaps the closest in spirit to Adamczewski’s drawing, may be read as commentaries on the limits of freedom in liberal societies. It would seem that for Eales the permissiveness of a consumer society conceals a depletion of political agency. In BLACK PAINTING 1 (2014), for instance, a figure dressed in black has been crudely painted in watercolour. Below him, in child-like handwriting, reads the statement: “He enjoys freedom of the point to common rule”. These words suggest that, for Eales, what today passes as freedom is but another name for coercion. Similarly, in The Best Way To… (2014), a visitor’s card to a refugee and migrant justice centre with Eales’ name on it has been stuck beneath a quotation taken from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a part of which is cited here:

    The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and 4 freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.

It is of course slightly ridiculous to claim that Hitler’s words offer a fitting portrait of the contemporary moment, even if it is true that the economic crisis has led to the steady rise of the far right. Yet Eales seems aware of this, undermining his own statements with an almost adolescent sense of humour. The first citation above—“He enjoys freedom of the point to common rule”—should read: “He enjoys freedom to the point of common rule”. Similarly, in another drawing, a crude rendering of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau in Balham, London, a caption reads: “(High up a great place for a sniper)”. Eales’ work is always tempered by a sense of the ridiculous, yet this need to make mirth of one’s own powerlessness touches upon a fundamental aspect of our contemporary moment.

Two works by the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein raise similar questions, though these are more concerned with the critical stakes of artistic production than the social as such. In the first, This Man Wants to Kill You! (2013), a blotted sheet of paper is cut across by a diagonal strip of yellow and two triangles, the one blue the other pink. Above these geometric shapes is a man, an assassin or secret agent out of film noir, who is pointed at by an arrow connected to a caption that reads: THIS MAN WANTS TO KILL YOU!. In the second work, which deploys a similar iconography, a sinister figure shows a man an artwork whose geometric forms echoes those described above. Above him a caption reads: “Before you go, you have to see it, Sir”. These geometric shapes, evocative of Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, are here presented as evidence, as if art itself were guilty of some crime. Like Kozlov’s work, Pepperstein’s drawings are evocative of a clash between ideologies, suggesting perhaps that the utopian dreams of the Russian avant-garde, though still salvageable, have been sold out.

With this in mind, it is perhaps appropriate to end the present survey of SAVE YOURSELF! with a work by the British artist Rose Wylie, since it offers the broadest overview of the historical present and of our understanding of historical change. In a collage titled A Handbook of Roman, the artist depicts a contest between a gladiator and a lion (the image is drawn from the cover of Martin Henig’s A Handbook of Roman Art, from which the work takes its title). The 5 bright yellow beast leaps in attack, its right flank pierced by an arrow, while the gladiator moves defensively to the right.

What is significant about Wylie’s work is the tension between the work’s classical subject matter and the working method employed. The drawings are crude and the collage technique is, at first glance, makeshift, sitting incongruously with the source of the work’s subject-matter, a Roman fresco. Yet, like many of the drawings presented in the exhibition, the work is deceptive in its simplicity. The various folds and cuts that constitute the pictorial field are carefully worked out. The arrow that pierces the lion’s flank, for instance, can be traced through two folds of paper, while different layers of the work are suggestive of different temporalities. Fragmented messages are overlaid upon one another, so that faint echoes of the past disturb the surface of the image. Handbook for Roman Art, Yellow Leopard might be imagined as a paper palimpsest, evoking the work of memory and forgetting. Wylie’s work reminds us that history is not oriented towards the past but towards the future, towards unknown recontextualisations.

© Rye Dag Holmboe, 2014. Courtesy of the author.

[1] Rye Dag Holmboe is correct to note the lack of spontaneity in these drawings: they show classical compositional features. However, it is also true that Evgenij Kozlov ascribes only part of his work to "Chaose art". Note by H. Fobo.

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