A graduate of the Vera Mukhina Academy in St Petersburg and the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Nuremberg, Maxim Ivanov is both a painter and a photographer. His geometric abstractions first caught my attention while he was still a student at the Vera Mukhina Academy, when he managed to stake out his own small -- yet nevertheless his own -- place in the overpopulated territory of abstract art (a hundred artists to every square centimetre). Although Maxim continues to work in the various media incarnations of abstract art, his latest exhibition at the Marina Gisich Gallery addresses another line of his art -- photography. Maxim Ivanov has spent a long time studying the media and technical aspects of photography. Whether they incorporate classical techniques or work with the computer, all his photographs are distinguished for a quality rare in Russia -- their optical-technical realisation. The series of nudes on display at the Marina Gisich Gallery hover between two extremes. One is traditional straight photography, explaining the high standards of observation, the brilliant encapsulation of nature and the manipulation of the corporeal material to evoke different states of mind. The second extreme is the manipulative line, deforming and transforming the material of life, moulding a new and usually frightening reality. This openly modernist device is closely linked to the poetics of the photographic images of Surrealism -- the nudes of Man Ray, Pierre Molinier and Hans Bellmer in particular. At the very end of the twentieth century, Surrealism made an unexpected return from the history archives. Maxim has done more than just capture the historical and artistic mood of the time, articulating a modernist device with the aid of modern computer technology. Torn between the magnetic appeal of straight photography and pictorialism and heavily influenced by tradition, he has found his own intonation, staking out his own place on another territory equally overpopulated by artists.