dream works

Kostas Seremetis

July 19 — August 4, 2013
Triumph gallery

Kostas Seremetis (born 1972) started out as an underground artist in the 1990s. He painted the walls of clubs in Boston, created video clips for obscure bands, and was fond of street art. Then Seremetis moved to New York and began to study painting, graphics, sculpture. His first exhibitions were held there, after which he was dubbed "The Rauschenberg of our generation."

Over the past ten years, the artist’s solo exhibitions have been held in major galleries and museums from Paris and Berlin to Tokyo, and individual works have been presented along with works by Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat. For his first exhibition in Moscow, Kostas Seremetis prepared a series of paintings, collages, graphics and videos under the general name Dream Works, playing on the name of the famous animation studio.

Inferno. No one goes there without knowing where
2012
Mixed media, collage
25.4 × 33 cm

Over the past ten years, the artist’s solo exhibitions have been held in major galleries and museums from Paris and Berlin to Tokyo, and individual works have been presented along with works by Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat. For his first exhibition in Moscow, Kostas Seremetis prepared a series of paintings, collages, graphics and videos under the general name Dream Works, playing on the name of the famous animation studio.

Kostas Seremetis mixes elements of Dadaism, pop art and street art, creating a kind of "dream factory" of contemporary art. He uses collage techniques in painting and video, where he brings together historical characters and superheroes from popular comics. Kostas Seremetis: "I've always loved comics and initially wanted to become an animator. This has greatly influenced the fact that I use the installation technique so often in my work: when combining different materials and cultural phenomena, a new perception effect is created." Among his ideological inspirers, the artist names William Burroughs, who used the slicing method to create his works, showing how modern pop culture manipulates people’s minds.

Comic book and cartoon characters fill Seremetis' works: monsters from the Marvel world appear on Dante’s engravings, Disney characters unite in a large multi-channel video collage, and the artist calls Spiderman and Thor the Eros and Zeus of our time. The heroes of popular culture, according to Seremetis, are similar to the gods of ancient Greek myths, who were reborn in our century in a new guise. By combining seemingly incompatible and incompatible realities in a single "visual field" where they are devoid of logic and original narrative, Kostas Seremetis presents the viewer with a new perspective on the environment, free from stereotypes of thinking and mass ideology.