art

Fragments of animals, trees and human faces come together in this series of surreal collages from multidisciplinary artist Sergei Sviatchenko. Sourcing material from his own photography, the Ukraine-born, Denmark-based collagist splices Soviet landscapes with contemporary motifs from rock culture and avant-garde cinema. The visual remixes will soon debut alongside Sviatchenko’s collected paintings in For Light and Memory, the first comprehensive survey of his work at Gestalten Space in Berlin. “It’s my personal photo archive,” he explains, “the whole period of my life, including my very strict education and the hippie movement.” Having been featured in publications including Dazed & Confused, It’s Nice That and Elephant, Sviatchenko is also the proprietor of Close Up and Private, a cult style blog documenting preppy, minimalist menswear from across the globe. “I noticed the blogging culture and just wanted to participate,” admits the artist, who uses the site to propagate clever, manifesto-like statements such as “Serge Gainsbourg looked smart in a trench coat and so do you,” and “Cherish a good relationship with your parents.” This week, the polymath turned the ongoing project into a printed edition, launching the super-sized Close Up And Private #01: The Yellow Issue in collaboration with Florence’s leading menswear tradeshow Pitti Immagine Uomo.

Black-and-white bodies in meditative poses are juxtaposed with geometric fluorescent forms in Thomas Dozol’s recent series of silkscreen prints. The New York-based artist began to experiment with the stencil technique about a year ago, evolving a practice that begins in the studio with traditional film, and ends with vivid pigments at the serigraph. “I was tired of the physicality of photographic prints,” explains Dozol of the shift. Working with a cast of models—friends, associates, some a mixture of both—the artist directed his subjects to gaze into the void prior to isolating the portraits from their original setting and placing them into bright, abstracted architectural contexts. “Most of our interactions are virtual and our bodies are these objects left behind,” he says. “So I asked people to be in a half-asleep zone, like sculpture, as though not completely alive.” The series will feature in Dozol’s solo exhibition Côtes d’Azurs, opening at London's French Riviera gallery this week, following a busy year for the artist that has included a solo show at the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York and a group exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. This time, the series will come to life beneath the glow of black lights: “I just want the space to mimic what the prints were trying to convey.”