Vasily Klyukin: San Francisco
Klyukin's Cryptos are "impressive for their size or geometric appearance on the one hand, but most of all, for their complexity: their height, diameter, structure, and materiality are not left to chance."
—Dr. Tayfun Belgin, Director of the Osthaus Museum
Serge Sorokko Gallery is thrilled to announce an exclusive U.S. representation of an innovative and critically acclaimed artist, Vasily Klyukin.
Born in 1976, in Moscow and now living and working in the South of France for well over a decade, Mr. Klyukin has produced sculptures for important international solo exhibitions at The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, The Arsenal Nord at the Venice Biennale, and the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, among others. Without the use of fasteners, Kluykin conjoins flat sheets of industrial material (typically steel, polycarbonate, plywood, or cardboard) laser-cut to his specifications to form extraordinary, complex, and vivid three-dimensional sculptural works.
Klyukin’s wall sculptures currently on display at the Serge Sorokko gallery are part of his remarkable Crypto (short for “cryptograph”) series, where each work comprises a flat circular base with perpendicular equally spaced fins radiating from a smaller circular opening. Before arriving at the gallery, these Crypto artworks had been displayed at the artist’s solo exhibition, Mind Space, at the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany, which opened to great critical acclaim in September 2022 and ran through January 2023.
Dr. Tayfun Belgin, director of the Osthaus Museum, observed that Klyukin’s Cryptos are “impressive for their size or geometric appearance on the one hand, but most of all, for their complexity: their height, diameter, structure, and materiality are not left to chance.” Indeed, each of the fins’ wavering ridge lines in the Crypto series is based on data derived from various unspecified phenomena, as if the work itself is a cipher, with only the title offering a clue to the nature of the data it models.
American art critic and writer, Noah Becker, sees the Crypto works and the transforming appearances of openings between fins “as ambient sensors of feeling, mystical and knowing, gilled like wild mushrooms.” Using just his hands, Klyukin intuitively applies acrylic paint (and sometimes varnish, rose petals, or other media) onto the sculpture to evoke powerful sensations and feelings.
