Sergei Uryvaev and Alexei Stepanov

Urivaev&Stepanov1 Sergei Uryvaev. Born in 1981. Lives in St. Petersburg. Graduate of the St. Petersburg Universityof Technology and Design. Took upper-level courses in scriptwriting and directing. Alexei Stepanov. Born in 1981.Lives in St. Petersburg. Graduate of the St. Petersburg UniversityofTechnologyandDesign.

Uryvaev and Stepanov insist on turning art into math. Each of his 39 paintings represents a certain number, and its color scheme is based on the analogical matrix of numbers and chromatic/anti-chromatic colors portrayed on a central canvas. The pure mechanics of this formal experiment are broken down by yet another analogy: an obvious reference to the sacred father of Russian contemporary art, “The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10” of 1915, where Malevich’s Black Square occupied the place of an icon for his 39 Suprematist paintings. Today Uryvaev and Stepanov replace Malevich’s revolutionary variations on the absence of subject matter with a game of abstract shape and its contemporary iconography trough for design, comics and graffiti in equal measure. Here, manifesta placed by a clear, bright table of colors that can be used to fine-tune the artist’s code.
Maxim Krekotnev

Проект Матрица цвета. 2007. Вид экспозиции; The Color Matrix. 2007. Exposition view