Sanya Kantarovsky: Center

Capitain Petzel is pleased to present Center, an exhibition of paintings by Sanya Kantarovsky, made in 2021 and the first third of 2022.

Responding directly to the Soviet era modernist architecture of Kunst im Heim, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, Kantarovsky alters the space with a symmetrical arrangement of walls that evoke both religious architecture and anatomical symmetry.

This intervention sets the stage for motifs of anatomy, biology and spirituality that recur throughout the paintings. The title work, Center, presents a human organ system floating in space. The brain, perched on top of the esophagus, has a face with a look of concentration. Invoking the Qigong practice of visualizing one’s organs smiling, this brain seems able only to manifest his own belabored expression.

In Wordly Concerns (Milarepa), the Tibetan saint and murderer who attained redemption through Buddhist practice is pictured in his typical repose, with his right hand pressed against his ear, listening to the universe. In contrast, Lear presents the Shakespearean antihero, a victim of the ego, in a state of disconnection, with his crown slipping from his hidden hand. Growth presents a humanoid mushroom stretching enthusiastically upwards, set against a backdrop of meandering capillaries, veins and bowels – the hidden apparatus of life.

In Return a female figure gazes at an organ system that appears to have slithered into her lap, evoking images of the prodigal son’s return to the father. Throughout the paintings, figures in various states of decomposition and / or regeneration appear to dissolve into space and material, their corporeality bearing a spectral, impermanent quality. Art historical precedents reverberate throughout the surfaces, such as De Chirico’s late classicism in Spirits, or Van Gogh’s saturated impasto in Pumpkin.

Housed in the auxiliary galleries is a presentation of monotype prints created with the artist‘s long-time print-making collaborator Marina Ancona at 10 Grand Press. These prints lay bare the process of conjuring images through the re-working of “ghosts” – building on the residue of previously painted images on the plate. Functioning as both preliminary ideas and reflections on the paintings in the exhibition, the prints offer a dierent register of seeing, hinging on the indexical slippage between paper and acrylic glass.

The viewer is invited into a synesthesia in which the realms of experience, thought, form and materiality are violated, overlapped and disordered. The notion of self is fragmented in both object and image. Locating one’s center, the commonly proclaimed goal of Western contemporary wellness and self-help literature, is demonstratively absent. There is no center.

Sanya Kantarovsky (born 1982 in Moscow, lives and works in New York) has recently had institutional solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. His works have been included in group shows such as 100 Drawings from Now, Drawing Center, New York; Radical Figures, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Baltic Triennial 13, Vilnius; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, Jewish Museum, New York; The Eccentrics, Sculpture Center, New York. Kantarovsky’s works are held in many collections around the world including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Tate Modern, London and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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