Post Soviet Avant Garde Art. Silver Gelatin Print Photograph with Colored Pencil
7-90-8, 1990
Gelatin silver print, photo with colored pencil
5 1/2 x 5 5/8 in. (14 x 14.5 cm) image
Igor Savchenko was born in 1962 in Minsk, Belarus, in the former Soviet Union. Savchenko was one of the key figures of the Belarusian conceptual movement of the late Eighties, has had more than 20 solo shows in cities across Europe and the US. His photographs explore his relationship with photography, reality, memory and history. He has created conceptual and experimental works, frequently using photographs taken by amateurs in the 1930-1950s. Savchenko changes the meaning of the photos by re-photographing and re-framing them.
He studied cybernetics and automatic control systems at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, and graduated in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering. Until the early 1990s, he worked as an engineer in Minsk. Savchenko is also an avid scuba diver, having begun his training in 1980 with instructor Valery Burtsev in Minsk. In 2005, he participated in a deep-diving master class at the famous Blue Hole in South Sinai, Egypt.
He has showed with Kevin Bubriski, Neil Folberg, Nicholas Hughes, Olivier Mériel, James Nicholls
Prabir Purkayastha, Pentti Sammallahti, Igor Savchenko, George Tice and Jean Claude Wouters and many others
In 1989 Savchenko began working as a photographer with Valery Lobko at the Creative Photography Studio. In 1990, he was awarded a prize by the Kodak-Pathe Foundation at the Salon Internationale de la Recherche Photographique in Royan, France. He received his first solo exhibition the following year at Galleri Index/Fotografi Centrum (now the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation) in Stockholm, Sweden. From 1997 through 2005, he pursued various text-based and mixed media projects, and in 2006 he returned his focus to photography. In 2013, he received his first solo exhibition in Moscow at the Lumière Brothers Centre for Photography.
Post Soviet Avant Garde, this work has a Dada, Arte Povera sensibility to it.
Igor Savchenko lives and works in Minsk, Belarus. He is represented by Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York; by Giedre Bartelt Galerie in Berlin; and by Russian Tea Room (RTR) Gallery in Paris.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Fotografiska Museet - Moderna Museet, Swedish Museum of Photography, Stockholm, Sweden
Fotomuseum München, Munich, Germany
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
Moderna Museet (The Museum of Modern Art), Stockholm, Sweden
Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
National Library of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus
National Museum of Photography, Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Belarusian State Museum of History of the Great Patriotic War, Minsk
Brandts Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
The Hasselblad Collection, Gothenburg, Sweden
The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow, 20th Century Russian Photography...
Category
1990s Conceptual Color Pencil Photography
MaterialsColor Pencil, Silver Gelatin