A leading conceptualist Ukrainian artist, using diversified techniques including installation, performance and photography, Arsen Savadov’s newest work Gulliver’s Dream is focused on paintings, the first to be shown at HG Contemporary. These lush, vibrant, and exuberant works exemplify and attest to the artist’s rigorous training, a graduate of the Kiev Art Institute, and unearths a vision of an untapped school of thought that evokes emotion, relaxation, and delight. The artist states, “I do not want to be ironic anymore and there is nothing revolutionary in replication and artifice for me today, I simply swim in the ocean of images important for me personally and as an artist.”
An integral component that Savadov wishes to convey is the mock ideals of the Enlightenment era and our postmodern world taking a definitive position in being able to illustrate and storytell in an engaging way. Ergo, the emphasis lies not in the formalities and constructs of the painting medium but in the journey taken when these symbolic images are portrayed together, woven to contemplate and reflect the beauty and poetic semantics of Savadov’s imagination throughout Gulliver’s Dream. In the thigh of Venus adorned with Napoleon’s bicorne hat, Mary Magdalene’s hand resting on Damien Hirst's infamous skull in paint, St. Sebastian pierced by darts and colored pencils—all formulating figments of the artist’s imagination which are rooted in his knowledge of art history as well as his inspiring ability to imagine the old arts and masteries making them transferrable and recreating into a contemporary realm.
About Arsen Savadov
Arsen Savadov is an exceptionally acclaimed artist molded by the late Soviet epoch of Perestroika. Savadov extracted a new contemporary art of the Ukrainian state, bringing forth a local version of postmodernism constructed upon the barren aftermath and ruins of the Soviet Union. Through this, propagated the ideologies that would shape what has created a revolutionary artist.
As a young artist, Savadov garnered popularity after his painting Cleopatra’s Sorrow, co-authored with Juri Senchenko which created a cacophony caused an uproar at the 1987 Youth Exhibition in Moscow. He was an active participant of the prominent Paris Commune artistic movement (Kiev, Ukraine) during the collapse of Soviet Union and early years of the Ukrainian independence has also influenced his oil painting immensely as one would assume experiencing a disintegrating regime with collapsing dogma, it comes as no surprise that the artist would view painting a controlled medium, as a place to dream. He has been exhibited widely in Europe and USA.