Igor Chursin
© Igor Chursin
About The Artist:
Igor Chursin (b. 1962) joined the Kharkiv art photography scene in 1989 with a portrait project. In 1991 – 1993 he exhibited Halomania – a series of decadent staged black and white or hand-colored images. The series was produced in collaboration with the artist Sergey Shmat. Shmat drew on Chursin’s black and white photographs and colored them using pencil, chalk or airbrush on the black and white photographs.
Halos and crescents, exotic props, mysterious ambiance, emphatic facial expressions and erotic poses of the models reveal the artist's ironic attitude to the pomp of commercial art tastes. N. Vakulina in her essay on Chursin's Halomania (Halomania, Top Foto, Feb. 1998, p.92) states that the images are simultaneously reminiscent of mass-produced calendars on religious themes and pseudo-pornographic postcards (at that time both products were illegally sold to passengers on trains by supposedly 'dumb' sellers).
In early 1990′s, Igor Chursin was renting a commercial photography studio where he earned a living making passport photos. It was the time when Ukraine became an independent state (1991). After decades of isolation many Ukrainians needed new passports since they could now travel behind the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1994 the artist immortalized that period in Ukraine's post-Soviet history producing his stunning Ukrainian-Mongolian Folk Art collages that consisted of hundreds of hand-colored passport photo images.
View: Ukrainian-Mongolian Folk Art
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