Anton Ginzburg
Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives
December 3, 2016–February 5, 2017
Southern Alberta Art Gallery
601 3 Ave S
Lethbridge Alberta T1J 0H4
Canada
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10am–5pm,
Thursday 10am–7pm,
Sunday 1–5pm
T +1 403 327 8770
info@saag.ca
Anton Ginzburg
Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives
Anton Ginzburg, a New York-based artist, presents a new body of work titled Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives. The exhibition explores the collapse of the modern universalist project. Visitors encounter a series of artistic investigations recalling Constructivist pedagogical experiments combined with the artist’s personal mythologies.
Throughout the 1920s, VKhUTEMAS (the Soviet equivalent of Bauhaus) reflected the school’s mandate to merge progressive politics and technical innovation within the universalist, modernist project. In a summer residency among the mountains of southern Alberta, Ginzburg engaged in visual exercises, including colour and spatial studies, photography, and graphic explorations, reanimating avant-garde methodology into a present day North American context. In a playful if destructive gesture, the artist burned spatial studies, summoning the aura of the interrupted avant-garde experiment. The deconstructive gesture is echoed in Ginzburg’s new film Turo—the third installment of his trilogy preceded by Hyperborea and Walking the Sea. In Turo, three modernist buildings are explored as stages for past utopias along with a recording of a “ghost mode” video game based in the ruins of Pripyat (site of Chernobyl catastrophe) and featuring Tatlin’s unrealized tower. The artist employs Esperanto—a language devised as an international medium of communication—to guide the viewer through each chapter of this “fictionalized non-fiction.”
Anton Ginzburg was born in 1974 in Leningrad, USSR, where he received a classical arts education before immigrating to the United States in 1990. Ginzburg earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 1997 and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts. His art has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and White Columns in New York, among others.
Blue Flame: Constructions and Initiatives is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
