Sergey Zlotnikov. "Heroes"

For the exhibition at the Saray Gallery, photographer Sergey Zlotnikov chose the Heroes series.

As conceived by the author, the photographs are arranged in pairs based on external contrast, obvious dissimilarity and internal kinship, accessible to the artist’s eyes. So a classic Roman or Greek statue becomes the prototype of a city dweller, focused on everyday life and clearly not associating himself with ideal examples of antiquity. Having lost her hands, the statue of Venus found a pair in a woman-house painter with a huge pick-up in her hands, frozen in the picture no less significantly and gracefully than her vis-a-vis. The look of a street café worker looking distantly into space is full of dignity and concentration, like David’s gaze from Michelangelo.

The visual art of photography in this case intentionally focuses on classical samples, because, according to Sergey Zlotnikov, “those who did not leave Gogol’s“ Overcoat, left the Parthenon ”, and the archetypes of Greek civilization show in the guise of a humble hero of everyday life.

The "heroic" theme is the printing technique - manual contact printing, the so-called platinum typography and copper photo engraving.

The process of classic copper photo engraving is extremely time-consuming, allowing you to get the quality of the print, impossible with other approaches. Each of the technological stages can bring a surprise, and the artist must be ready to respond quickly to maintain his vision. Hand printing conveys the energy of copyright participation to the work, and the properties of platinum and palladium salts make the image unique in transmitting details, halftones, and shade depth.

Modern photo engraving is called the technology of immortality: copper, platinum and palladium printing gives archival durability to photographs. So Sergey Zlotnikov, using the technology of artistic vision, immortalized his heroes along with ancient characters.

Sergey Zlotnikov was born and raised in Moscow, graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute (Architectural Institute) in the class of B.G. Barhina. Since 1989, lives and works in Pittsburgh, USA. I always dreamed of combining two hobbies - photography and etching. But before the advent of the Internet era, I did not know that this had already been done by the inventors of copper photo engraving Klick and Talbot a long time ago. An indelible impression was first made by the original imprint from a copper board in the Boston Gallery, in 1996. In 2004, New York hosted a workshop on photo engraving by Lothar Ostenberg.

Sergey Zlotnikov is one of the few practitioners who are personally involved in all stages of the process, from shooting to film or digital, editing, scanning, preparing transparencies, to etching and printing. The artist's works participated in many international graphic biennials, are stored in private, corporate and museum collections in different countries.