The exhibition “Costume Workshop” refers to Pirumov's theatrical background. It presents a new series of paintings in which the artist continues the theme of human transformations accompanying transitional or borderline situations.
In this project, Pirumov acts as the production designer of a non-existent play, where paintings become its scenic elements. In the exhibition, human anatomy is intertwined with the backstage — rib designs also refer to the curtain system in the theater. The artist focuses on the process of bodily or biological metamorphosis. Pirumov considers the physical shell as a prop or background for a story about a “decoration man, a form without content. On canvases, the image of a person is in the center of the plot, but inside the exhibition it takes on different meanings. The characters of the works — randomly found online or people they meet — pass through the visual filter of the artist and move away from their original source, becoming figures that are shuffled and redefined by him to new roles and positions of the conventional narrative. Like fragments from different productions found in theatrical storage, they randomly collide in space, becoming the setting of a play about erased identity and fluid physical boundaries.
At the Costume Workshop exhibition Pirumov addresses the topic of the psychosomatics of historical processes and the body's response to them. In this perspective, time in the usual sense stopped moving, and the body lost its former function. Against the background of the constant reproduction and editing of human images circulating in the online space, the biological body is still the main way of human existence in reality. However, in the context of increasing biopolitics, the development of ideas of transhumanism and modern medicine, it is subject to increasing control and deformation. If we perceive the body as a shell that does not belong to its owner, the question of whether something human will remain in the human body in the future comes to the fore: it will either undergo endless modification, or it will remain the last refuge of vulnerability.”
Marina Bobyleva
