Kozhuar Vladimir

Ukrainian artist. Vladimir Kozhukhar was born in 1968 in the Odessa region. Painter, graphic artist. Graduated from the Art and Graphic Faculty of the Southern Ukrainian Pedagogical University. K. Ushinsky (1996). The artist has been working with one of the main Moscow galleries “Regina” for more than ten years. Lives and works in Odessa. Kozhukhar’s projects of the 2000s “My USSR”, “Forest” testify to the fact that he is, by definition, a visionary. And it is quite organically fit into the main tendency of the Ukrainian art of the 2000s — the expansion of the possibilities of vision. What, perhaps, is the main difference between the art of the 1990s, which is focused on the fact that “everything has already been”, has all been named, hence the possibility of constructing new meanings is excluded. Independent access to the essence of the “magical universe”, which is lost in the void, is closed to us. Times change, today this “impossibility of access” again becomes a controversial issue. From the point of view of so-called post-media realism, which is most influential at the present moment of the trend, it turns out that the number of medial filters, “machines of vision,” usurping our vision, does not affect the quality of the picture … Because the vision today emancipates from the production of meanings. Let’s consider it a peculiar reaction to the decadent “postmodern fatigue”, the artist seems to fall into amnesia, starting his relationship with the surrounding world, more precisely, with the visual fact of his existence, from a blank sheet. Quote from Vladimir Kozhukhar. “For me, as an artist, one of the sides of the understanding of postmodernism as an obvious phenomenon is the fact that there is too much art, that the accumulated potential of previous generations of artists is an inexhaustible resource, which is very convenient to resort to being heard. I note that here I am not trying to give definitions of postmodernism. I’m talking about a resource, and in this case, about the resource of abundance. The project, offered to the viewer, appeals to another category of resource, resource of crisis situations “.

Photo by Vladimir Kozhukhar from the series “Not toys” 2002 130-180 cm. Gallery M. Gelman