Gorshkov Ivan

The machinery of Ivan Gorshkov's happy accident generator, grandiose and magnificent in its smooth, uninterrupted movement, continues with the Gorshkov2 exhibition. Not flower pots or night pots, or those pots that were placed on the heads of Protestant clergy and the Beatles, but two Pots: the youngest, Ivan, and the eldest— Sergei. In one of his interviews, Ivan Gorshkov said that an artist must constantly produce situations from which [one can] extract creative luck.… Maybe it's more interesting, more fun to do everything not by yourself... but to reach out to the whole world and ... establish [production] of these successful coincidences for your creativity by going to a flea market, surfing the Internet or collaborating with other people. It is surprising that with this approach, Gorshkov Jr. avoided cooperation with his father, a wonderful artist, the art director of the famous Voronezh gallery H.L.A.M. at the stage of its formation and the co-founder of the art residence in Divnogorye, Sergey Gorshkov, for so long. In the new works made for the Gorshkov2 exhibition, both artists reinterpret each other's works. These works, as defined by the younger Gorshkov, as if they were their own, but only better, are inspired by another author's method — find and improve. It lies in the transformative power of art, through which imperfect things that we encounter on a daily basis undergo an amazing metamorphosis and become what they should be — flawlessly perfect. ... if you add Gorshkov to Gorshkov, you get not two Gorshkovs, but Pots in a square, because the degree of their joint artistic effort and the impossibility, unthinkability of his objective results grows exponentially, reaches an upper extreme and, overcoming it, rushes to infinity — to where the crystal of the purest croesus glows with a magical and intricate light.

Text: Alexey Maslyaev

Ivan coined the term lucky chance generator, which describes unexpected project development options depending on the behavior of the material and its reaction to the impact of the tool. With this approach, the workshop turns into a research laboratory, and the creation of a work resembles an experiment, the result of which is impossible to predict.

For Ivan, Vaults workshops became a real creative laboratory, and high-tech machine tools, including the KUKA robotic arm and a numerical control machine (CNC), participated in the operation of the generator of happy accidents.

Text: Olga Druzhinina.