Sergei Sviatchenko

b. 1952

Sergei Sviatchenko (born 1952) is a Danish - Ukrainian architect, artist, photographer, and curator. He is a representative of the Ukrainian New Wave, that arose in Ukraine up through the 1980s and he was one of the founders of the Soviart Center for Contemporary Art (Soviart) in Kiev and co-organizer and curator of the first Ukrainian exhibitions of contemporary art. Collage is found in Sviatchenko's work already in the beginning of the 1980s. In Sviatchenko's collages, a dialogue takes place between the material and the immaterial, between the realistic and the surrealistic. His collages comprise a kind of fusion of the recognizable and the unconscious, specific and symbolic, the detailed and the spontaneous. Two art movements are present in Sviatchenko's collages, of which one is anchored in Constructivism (art) and the other in Surrealism. Inspired by the avant-garde of constructivism and the Bauhaus school movement, a connection between architecture, photomontage, scenography, decoration, design solutions and clothing style is created in Sviatchenko's artistic expression. His compositions are often created with a minimum of elements such as fragments of human figures, buildings or recognizable objects which are combined by the artist into a new sculptural form. The concept Less-collage emerged in the 2000s as a trend within modern conceptual collage and was introduced by Sergei Sviatchenko for the first time in 2004. Sviatchenko's earliest image ideas were stylistically formed in his paintings at the end of 1990. The style mostly associated with Sviatchenko is especially characterized by an abstract expressionism with markings of landscape motifs applied with a significant palette and often with an atmosphere of contemplative repose pointing to the artist's preoccupation with the catharsis-theme. Moreover, lines and sketching of architectural figures are an element of many paintings, and he has experimented by including features from collage in characteristic mixed media. His paintings have recently become more expressive and wild and thus more spontaneous like the collages. In 2009, Sviatchenko together with his youngest son began work on the project “Close Up and Private” (CUAP). The project brings fashion photography into an artistic frame towards a more abstract understanding that views style and fashion as elements in a new aesthetic. He has lived in Denmark since the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Sviatchenko