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5 April 2008
“PHOTOGLYPHS”
Authors: Rimma Gerlovina & Valeriy Gerlovin

Artistic history:
We tend to follow our feelings, not our instincts; we follow the mind, not the feelings.
The intuition, not the mind. In a wonder tide, it’s all about the process to find the articulation of the soul’’ A little bit mysterious, nearly esoteric, This is how Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin talk about their art works, they are born for the insignia of the paradox, the work of this two artists is indeed difficult to define, also because in the course of the years the Gerlovins have passed from the installation to the performance, from the visual poetry to the photography. They life is defined by changes: after they have made part in the seventies of the Muscovite underground avant-garde art, in 1980 the two artists surge the repressive Soviet Russia to go live in the United States. Well received by the west, their work came immediately exposed in numerous museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, New Orleans Art Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of art, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and many others. Furthermore they created in America numerous sculptures, but above all they focus on a series to photographic works that they call photo glyphs ( literally ‘’incision with light’’, from the Greek phos- light and ‘’glyphé’’ engrave ) in which they use first levels brought closer, with words and cryptography similar to incisions, that are recalled also in their last work Perhappines.
Ambiguous and ironic,
This series images has nearly always as subject Rimma Gerlovina, with her undulated long hair and serpent forms, capable to change into anxious, seductive, penitential elements……’’ the hair is the organic material that is most within reach of the hands ( and of the head ) In technical terms, it’s the easy compact and self-sufficient way with which to dress a woman. It’s the most natural cloth, the more archetypal fashion that does never go out of fashion. It serves us contemporarily as pseudo clothing as well as hair shirt for the penitence. Since we tend to create art pieces based on time clause concepts, we have to follow their rules, that requires mythological and metaphoric forms to be revealed’’, explain the two authors.
The accelerated time of the contemporary reality is not in fact anticipated in their images, all at the contrary they are proposed as hanging symbolic works between myth and humor, mysticism and eccentric symbolism. We see Rimma among magic alchemic test tubes, while she plays the sorceress handling an egg (symbol of the primordial seed, of the sun and of the moon, let alone viaticum of the other world), or even in the version of ‘’ the taken off head of Saint John the Baptist relieved on a dish of hairs

Ecco il programma:

ore 9.45 Registrazione - Consegna del materiale
ore 10.00 Benvenuto
ore 10.10 MiMa - Chi siamo
ore 10.20 Apertura dei lavori
Presentazione degli autori Rimma Gerlovina e Valeriy Gerlovin a cura di Rosanna Checchi, direttrice della rivista Zoom.
ore 10.30 L’esperienza umana e professionale tra avanguardia moscovita degli anni Settanta fino all’ arte underground, quando i due artisti lasciano la Russia Sovietica per essere ben accolti negli Stati Uniti. Proiezione dei loro principali lavori
11.30 Coffee Break
11.45 Ripresa dei lavori - Gli autori e l’uso delle tecniche con materiale organico nella Ritrattistica - Rapporto con il mezzo espressivo, dall’ installazione alla performance, dalla poesia visiva alla fotografia
12.30 Spazio domande
13.00 Pausa pranzo con degustazione vini, in occasione del Vinitaly
14.30 Percorso guidato nell’osservazione diretta di lavori degli artisti
15.00 Didattica : I corsisti sperimentano in sala di posa
17.00 Dibattito - Rilascio attestato di frequenza - Conclusione dei lavori

BIOGRAPHY
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin were founding members of the underground conceptual movement in Soviet Russia, described in their book “Russian Samizdat Art” (Willis, Locker&Owens, NY,1986). Since coming to America in 1980, they had more than 40 personal exhibitions, from which 12 were in museums including the Art Institute of Chicago. The New Orleans Museum of Art made a retrospective of their photography (Photoglyphs), which traveled to venues in fifteen cities. Their new body of work (Perhappiness) was shown in a series of solo exhibitions in 2004/06. They participated in many international shows like The Venice Biennal; 100 Years of Avant-Garde in Central and Easter Europe in Bonn Kunstalle; the Polaroid Collection in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; “Russia!” in the Guggenheim Museum etc.

Their work have been featured in many books such as “Art on the Edge and Over”; “Reflections in a Glass Eye”, “”Works from the International Center of Photography Collection”; art historic books for colleges; as well as in many periodicals including the covers of “The New York Times Magazine”, “Zoom”; “The Sciences”; The Buddist Review Tricycle, and others. The New York Times Magazine gave them a spread in their Millennium Issue on art.

Their work is rapresented in many museum collection including international Centre of Photography, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Huston; The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; The DZ Bank Collection, Frankfurt, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and others.