Anna Bogouchevskaia is a German-Russian sculptor who comes from Moscow and has lived in Berlin since 1994.
Under the appealing title "Shouldn't be gone", she is showing new works, most of which she modeled between 2019 and 2021 and which were cast in 2022/23.
These are sculptures made of aluminum, nickel silver and bronze. Bogouchevskaia's works of recent years are united by a moment of fluidity, fluidity and fleetingness.
Her visual repertoire is orientated towards the three-dimensional depiction of water (in various states of aggregation, including fog and snow) as well as plants and animals. In Bogouchevskaia's material artistic approach, the state of permanent changeability of flowing water is, how could it be otherwise, brought to a standstill (as in the sculpture "Waterfall"), freezing a natural image of boundless movement. But this is based on the understanding that the flow of water is dynamic, which provokes the classic question of how this dynamic could be captured in sculpture.
Bogouchevskaia has found cloudy, cotton wool-like, at times surreal forms to counter the efficiency-driven world. These forms were influenced in no small part by filmic images from the French documentary "Microcosmos. Le peuple de l'herbe" ("Microcosm. The People of the Grass") from 1996.
As impressive as the film is, Anna Bogouchevskaia's sculptures are just as unmistakable, transferring the manifold forms of water into a poetic cycle of aesthetic substance solidification. It is a suggestive game that touches on fundamental questions of sculpture as well as the human use of natural resources.
The artist thus occupies a formally experimental terrain in the transition between figuration and abstraction, which is able to send out tactile as well as time-critical impulses. This artist celebrates the magnificence of water in narrative opulence and at the same time reminds us of the transience of all nature.
Bogouchevskaia's formal conception of the combinatorial is striking. With a twinkle in her eye, she brings together different sculptural positions and the still virulent spirit of post-impressionism in a balanced way.
The exhibition will be on display at the Kulturforum Noack from April 29 to August 26, 2023.
A 90-page publication will be published by DCV-Verlag to accompany the exhibition and a special edition of the sculpture "Meduse" will be available at a special price.