DMITRY GRETZKY, EUGENIA KATZ NARCISSUS: “SELFIE” AS A NEW MYTH OF SELF IDENTIFICATION - VIEWING ROOMS | Gallery of modern art
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Dmitry Gretzky and Eugenia Katz (b. 1970, Saint Petersburg).

The artistic couple from St. Petersburg live and work in Toronto. They belong to a small group of artists who have managed not only to merge academic training with current topics and narratives, but also to prove that an academic painter is able to think like a contemporary artist. By moving to Canada and changing their artistic environment, they broke off their relationship with the Russian tradition of representation that was front and center in their previous works. While Gretsky and Katz used to compulsively demonstrate the entire range of their abilities with the practiced skill of professional painters, a flexible self-restraint in their new surroundings has benefited this new series of works. 

Narcissus Is in the Age of Photosynthesis

 

In contemporary times, digital technologies/social media play a significant role in creating and spreading an image. Covid-19 pandemic has even deepened the global discussion about simulated reality and digital inequality. Before the pandemic, the digital reality influence was already non-ignorable, but now the possibility of balancing our physical and online existence is questionable.


Narcissus Is in the Age of Photosynthesis is the project that emerged during the world pandemic crises. It tries to question the overall “idea of self-awareness” in the era of digital technologies and how social media manipulate the human mind. From the idea of “self-design” through self-censorship, the artist duo Gretzky and Katz examine their changing life experience through the prism of the Myth about Narcissus.

 

Text: Theona Yamanidzhe, Anna Evtiugina

This project carries the pseudo-utopian ideas about the future where the anthropocentric world is no longer possible. In the myth, Narcissus falls deeply in love with his reflection as if it was
somebody else. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually realized that his love could not be reciprocated and melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white flower.


Building the body of work on their post-human interpretation of the myth, artists Gretzky and Katz think about “photosynthesis” as a metaphor of the natural and artificial that will become equal in the future. In the artists’ understanding, the transformation of Narcissus blurs the boundaries between organic forms and ideas around contrived forms. Artists create distorted figures of the human body that are disappearing in “flower” transformations. This experience relates to the rejection of strict dualism favoring the inner expansion of potentialities, including self-identification. The flower body has not changed the essence of Narcissus but rather freed his “supreme post-human form”.

 

Text: Theona Yamanidzhe, Anna Evtiugina

Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #14. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. 235×225×7 cm.

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Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #13. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. 230×300×7 cm

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Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #12. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. 230×300×7 cm

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Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #16. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. ~230×300×7 cm

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Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #11. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. 230×150×7 cm

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Dmitry Gretzky, Eugenia Katz #15. From the 'Narcissus' project.

2021. Сonstruction mesh. vellum, graphite. 240×200×7 cm

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In each work, a drawn image on a sheet is combined with industrial elements in the form of metal chain-link fencing and plastic ties, forming a whole. Marcel Duchamp was the first to see art in the window of a hardware store – and art has never been the same since. Gretsky and Kats, along with other contemporary artists, attempt to break away from the inertia of the medium and the automatism of plastic movements in graphic art, moving towards complex shapes, turning a drawing into an object. The three-meter size of the works is not just a sign of the times, but an attempt to create a new, different correlation of viewer and object. The drawing as an art technique is now augmented with material, a device which helps and at the same time hinders perception of the work.

Beginning with customary drawing tools – a slate pencil on paper, the artists increasingly re-entrust the function of the pencil to the chain-link, combined with the black ties which transform into the strokes that form the image. Sometimes the intertwining makes them resemble a Rembrandt etching: the metal chain-link in the artists’ hands acquires a completely graphic nature. The gaps that reveal the bare foundation of the paper, may be especially dramatic – this effect was well-known to the Italians Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, who cut up and burnt canvases, giving their paintings a literally physical corporality. Unlike the masters of the “arte povera”, the multi-layer “flesh” of the works of Gretsky and Kats looks less vulnerable, although the depicted figures are usually nude.

 

Text: Pavel Gerasimenko

Thanks to their academic training, Gretsky and Kats swiftly achieved virtuosity in their use of building and industrial materials. In this new series of works they return again to the foundations of anatomic drawing. As in their last project, “House for Sale”, displayed at the gallery in 2018, we see the inner world of their dwelling, which also serves as their workshop. It is impossible to draw an exact dividing line between creativity and the everyday, the lofty and the ordinary, artist and person, action and inaction. We can only take selfies and try to keep to the middle distance, including in the composition of works, where this is determined by the fixed size of the material itself. The visual effect is distributed and partially delegated to the chain-link. 
 

In the new works, Walter Benjamin’s opposites of “mechanical reproduction” and “aura” are reconciled. The artists give the meters of industrially manufactured chain-link an individual face instead of mechanical uniformity – to explode with an expressive howl or huddle up with a baroque grimace. The light changes, and the perception becomes cinematographic: the vision grows cloudy, loaded down with time, disentangling itself from the intertwining lines at the bottom of the sheet, as if the chain-link literally served as a fence. The eye, looking at the enormous sheets in admiration, begins to understand that narcissism had a point, after all.

 

Text: Pavel Gerasimenko

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021

Photo from the artist's studio in Toronto. Canada, 2021.

A preview of the project "Narcissus in the Age of Photosynthesis" took place at the Cosmoscow-2021 international contemporary art fair. Many works from the project have already been purchased for some of the best private collections in Russia and abroad.

The exposition of the Marina Gisich Gallery stand at the international contemporary art fair COSMOSCOW 2021.

The exposition of the Marina Gisich Gallery stand at the international contemporary art fair COSMOSCOW 2021.

The exposition of the Marina Gisich Gallery stand at the international contemporary art fair COSMOSCOW 2021.

The exposition of the Marina Gisich Gallery stand at the international contemporary art fair COSMOSCOW 2021.

.The exposition of the Marina Gisich Gallery stand at the international contemporary art fair COSMOSCOW 2021.