George Pusenkoff

puzenkov_08_0 Born in 1953 in Krasnopolie. Graduated from the ArtDepartment of the Moscow Institute of Printing. From 1983 to 1987 he participated in such exhibitions as: the 17th and 18th Youth, Rock-Art Parade “ASSA”, in exhibitions of the “Hermitage” and “Labyrinth” associations. Lives in Köln and Moscow. The business card of the artist – the picture “Single Mona Lisa 1:1” – has been on display in many museums of the world and at the 51st Biennale in Venice.

The project Who is Afraid

In George Pusenkoff’s project, abstraction is not only form, but also plot. This story of abstraction is a meditation on the career of modernism, on the transformation of monochromatic painting, geometric abstraction, and spontaneous gesture. It also asks what happened to the idea of art’s autonomy, how creative work was industrialized.
Like Malevich in his day, Pusenkoff announces his move beyond the zero of forms. This transition revolves around the computer pixel. The fundamental graphic element and building brick of the new digital reality, the pixel also recalls the most important geometric figure in the history of abstraction: Malevich’s Black Square. Moreover, for Pusenkoff the pixel is not a metaphorical figure, but a “unit of action” (to invoke the idiom of the avant-garde) and the sign of a genuine interaction with technology.
The new technologies lead him to the discovery of this color effect, and he then transfers his observations to canvas. The future of abstraction is reflected on the computer screen in order to return in the guise of formal painterly experiments. Pusenkoff fuses abstraction and the computer interface, the virtual and the real. He performs a loop in time: he goes back into the past in order to meet himself. He returns to us from out of the past in the words of Barnett Newman, who once asked the question Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?: “They say that I have advanced abstract painting to its extreme, when it is obvious to me that I have made only a new beginning.”

Olesya Turkina

Георгий Пузенков. Проект Who is Afraid (Кто боится). 2007. Вид экспозиции. Московский музей современного искусства. Сourtesy автор / George Pusenkoff. The project Who is Afraid. 2007. View of the exposition. Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Сourtesy author