Yevgen Samborsky | СЕ 049201

Voloshyn Gallery is proud to present the solo exhibition of Yevgen Samborsky, entitled СЕ 049201. The series presented at the show is comprised of new paintings with the artist’s trademark floral motifs and collage elements.

“…The most crucial theme I address in these works, I think, is the obliteration of the system we live in. The elements representing the system are placed on the plane of the canvas in an artistic gesture, inscribing them into a fiction, an artistic play, a fairytale, and summoning surrealist connotations of a painting, this classical, blinkered, outdated medium. These elements become a part of the game, acquiring ironic playful air…” 

Yevgen Samborsky

A certain effect operates in these works, namely, the effect described by the American art theorist Rosalind E. Krauss in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths as follows: “The collage element performs the occultation of one field in order to introject the figure of a new field, but to introject it as a figure-a surface that is the image of eradicated surface.” Banknotes, credit cards and passports (the “collage elements” in question) are not just markers of socioeconomic relations we are all inevitably engaged in. Despite their materiality, they carry an aspect of pure abstraction in their potential and possibilities. A banknote denotes the possibility of buying or selling goods, whereas a passport delineates one’s rights, freedoms and obligations. These objects can be described as “literal metaphors,” since they actually function as substitutes for objects and possibilities.

Yevgen Samborsky was born in 1984 in Ivano-Frankivsk. He graduated from the Vasyl Stefanyk National Precarpathian University in 2005. He held the Gaude Polonia Program fellowship in 2009 and 2012. He studied under the Polish artist Pawel Althamer in 2009-2012. He received the 2012 MUHi Prize, the 2013 First Special Prize of the PinchukArtCentre Award (as part of the Open Group). He is the winner of the 2017 Open Call for Young Ukrainian Artists organized by Dymchuk Gallery, and was a 2018 PinchukArtCentre Prize nominee. He was the curator of the Ivano-Frankivsk Artists’ Residency in 2015, and of the Porto Franko International Festival of Relevant Art in 2018. He currently lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.