ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 167

Maksim Kuznetcov
ART Habens
philosophical issue. I attempt to capture these
in my sculptures. I don’t do sketches on
paper, but rather I go directly to find the
balance of curves and lines in a 3D object. I
find this way of working much more natural
for me to land on something that looks ‘right’
to me. I try allowing my subconscious to lead
the sculpting process, rather than having a
strict conscious control. Sometimes, when
working on a series of sculptures with a
common subject arc, I prepare small plastellin
sketches before I start working on the full-size
pieces.
Before coming up with the realisation of
Empty Virgins, I produced a series of works
simply titled Virgins. I wanted to see if I could
tell a story of emotions though simple slightly
abstracted human figures. I have ended up
choosing women as the carrier for my
emotional metamorphosis experiment.
Although when I finished the pieces, I found
that they are lacking the ability to speak to
observers via the subconscious (as I
mentioned before). I wanted to reinforce the
message and make it less anchored to
symbols such as female sexuality or fertility,
even very reduced facial characteristics were
distracting, I noticed. I aimed the sculptures
to talk not just from their positive surfaces
and curves but to allow the message to come
from within them, from inside. Through a
series of experiments, I have come up with
‘doppelgangers’ of the original virgins, which
in my opinion have a much more developed
language that is hardly to be understood
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