Yuri Kuper

Born in Moscow (USSR) in 1940, Yuri Kuper studied at the Moscow Art Academy. Major artist, painter, sculptor, decorator, Yuri Kuper - member of the Mémoires group - works around the idea of memory (individual and collective) and is interested in objects of everyday life - brushes, dishes, tools, etc. - which he presents as isolated vestiges of an ancient world. Yuri Kuper exhibits in Paris, New York, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Brussels, Tokyo. On the occasion of the reopening of BochoÏ in 2007, Yuri Kuper created the costumes and sets for the opera of "Boris Godunov" by Mussorgsky. “There should be no intermediary between the viewer and the painting. The painting must hypnotize, in the same way that the surface of the thing contemplated hypnotized the painter ”. Yuri Kuper “Yuri Kuper is fascinating when he talks about his still lifes. He describes them entirely in technical terms. Any old object, in his most recent works, a brush, a palette knife, two small paint containers, one rectangular, the other square, can serve as a "theme"; everything else is surface rendered with breathtaking care, with extreme finesse. It's a familiar problem, the old problem of creating the image: how to build the illusion of a three-dimensional figure on a flat background, so that the background supports that illusion, instead of destroying it. This is a subtle task, and Kuper, who is a master of the art, does it better than anyone. Its finished object is highlighted, even when the surface merges with the apparently infinite background. Thus the surface of the object sometimes appears as a magnified detail of the background, especially since the painted objects are Kuper's working instruments, and they are covered with paint. In fact, they seem to emanate from the bottom, and this projection in space gives them a certain depth. Kuper is a modernist painter who walks along the border between gestural abstraction and geometric abstraction. »Donald Kuspit