It has never been otherwise / Иначе никогда не было, 2010 “It Has Never Been Otherwise” signifies a stopped frame, a moment frozen in time, perhaps even a utopian timelessness where history has come to an end. By attempting to arrest time, the artist leaves elements of motion within the installation, particularly in the sculpture "The Headless Horseman", which in the end turns out to be deceptive.
	Gesamt, 2010 The sculptural installation, "Gesamt", is the artist’s personal research into the existence of art’s "exalted form" in the era of mass reproduction. In contrast to the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Ginzburg believes that the course of history is an infinite one-dimensional context of visual fragments of mass culture.
	No echo, no shadow, 2009 “I’m amazed by how easily I was able to fight off a lot of complexes. I invented a role for myself, as an actress in America, and it started to please me very much.” —Natalya Negoda, interview with Playboy, 1989 Anton Ginzburg’s first solo show at Moscow’s Galerie Iragui, is an exploration of transition points between the imagined and the actual...
	Neon Traces, 2009 The shop signs in Eastern Europe populating the urban landscapes during the 20th century, were anonymous signifiers of various functions (i.e. hair salons, news stands, drug stores etc.), devoid of ownership. For Lille3000, Ginzburg has assembled a grouping of them on the facade of the headquarters of the Voix du Nord newspaper...
	Counter Geometries, 2008 Counter Geometries was conceived for display in New Orleans in conjunction with Prospect.1. Just as the biennial offered the city a chance to cultivate its creative potential in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Anton Ginzburg’s installation grew from the context of natural disaster...
	Abstract American, 2008 Abstract American is a reflection on the memory of form. Ideas and the aesthetic sensibilities used to express them intersect in the highly charged plane of the installation. Ginzburg has made several incisions in a plaster cast of a bust of Thomas Jefferson. (The original is the work of Jefferson’s contemporary, Jean-Antoine Houdon, a prominent sculptor of the Enlightenment)...
	Labor Installation, 2007 Labor Installation consists of two compositions, constructed around fragmented archetypes of work and toil. In the first, Sweat, a plastic replica of a halved loaf lies on mirrored, polished metal, creating the illusion of a whole loaf suspended in a circular void...
	Painter’s Sorrow, 2007 Painter’s Sorrow presents the component parts that go into producing an oil painting, but the painting itself remains unmade. Three photographs show models posed as though for a painter’s portrait studies. Pigments streak their faces rather than depict them...
	Suck, 2006 Suck alters the relationship between people and objects with dark, aggressive humor and a treatment of space that subordinates the gallery to its own ends. Raised text and a rubber hose are inserted into the wall. The hose extends to a velvet-flocked gasoline canister; its invasion of the viewer’s space physically doubles the psychological effect of the text, a Russian imperative with overt sexual innuendo...
	Non-Kosher, 2005 Non-Kosher’s serialized rectangular solids, penetrated by a slim cylinder, recall the objects of Donald Judd. But Ginzburg has reimagined them as the plain milk cartons and sausage from the Soviet bag of groceries. The work was produced for a Moscow exhibition on the art of the post-Soviet diaspora, and it abounds with cross-cultural contradictions...
	Haunted Circle, 2005 The circle is rich in mystic associations and ritual uses, a magic boundary that evil cannot transgress. In Haunted Circle, a black magic marker hangs on a chain from a bare nail in the wall. The chain is a radius in the circle drawn on the wall by the marker...
	Totemdoppelgänger, 2005 A ghost is imagined as a person’s posthumous double. In Totemdoppelgänger, Ginzburg has appropriated a cartoon ghost—a memory of East German stickers from the 1980s—and manufactured three-dimensional multiples of it. Enlarged and repeated, stacked one on top of the other, the ghosts acquire the seriousness of graven images...
	Trauma, 2004 Trauma is inspired by the approach of the Viennese Actionists, who wore scars as documents of their self-inflicted acts of violence. In Trauma, the artist re-envisions his teenage memories of immigration; but he takes the scars of that period of his life as a starting point rather than an outcome, and constructs new situations around them...
	Bullet Belt, 2001 Bullet Belt is both an artifact and a record of its use: two wearable bullet belts and a photograph woman wearing one. The bullets are made of pink porcelain—fragile rather than deadly—and the belts are white leather. The image of a woman in it evokes associations with an Amazon or a suicide bomber, but her pose suggests vulnerability...

© ANTON GINZBURG, 2010. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.