Sergei Bratkov
© Sergei Bratkov. Photo: Sergei Solonsky, mid-1990’s
About The Artist:
Sergei Bratkov (b. 1960, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is living in Moscow, Russia, where he teaches at the Rodchenko School for Photography, but his artistic career started in Kharkiv. His series of crudely pasted collages (Vera Frantsevna Ivanova, an Ordinary Soviet Woman, 1984) made him a welcomed member of the Kharkiv photography group. In 1986 he became one of the Gosprom group artists. In late 1980's – early 1990's he explored his vision through painting, graphics and film as well, but later concentrated on photography, video art and installation. In 1993 he turned his studio into an art gallery (The Up/Down Gallery) that existed until late 90's, where numerous art exhibitions took place. It was the first gallery in Kharkiv that consistently exhibited contemporary art, and some of now internationally recognized works (e.g. Boris Mikhailov’s I am not I) were first shown there.
Sergei has always been interested in making art where “photography plays a secondary or applied role” (T. Pavlova, 2015). His work included placing photographs in glass jars in a cupboard (We All Eat Each Other, 1991), immuring images in a lump of concrete (A Parcel, with Boris Mikhailov), and freezing images in a block of ice (Frozen Landscapes, 1994, an installation in memory of 45 homeless people frozen to death during a cold spell in Kharkiv). But alongside with these photo-objects he produced traditional black and white images, collages and staged photos.
Bratkov's No Heaven series (45 black and white images, 1995) is a very personal picture of his family and himself. A caption under one of the images goes: “My Mom and Dad met each other at the time of war. Dad came home on a 3-day leave and met a beautiful girl at a party. He got drunk and threw up onto her white dress. That girl became my Mom.”
Bedtime Stories (a.k.a. Horror Stories, 1998) is a project that illustrated so called 'Horror Verses', dark humor Russian folk poetry popular in the 1980's and 90's. Here is an example:
A young pioneer was fishing alone.
A maniac killer was all on his own.
Oh, how the old man kept cursing, you guess -
The pioneer's badge got stuck in his ass.
A series of meticulously and theatrically staged images were captioned with the verses. Here is the link to the video of the project first show at ArtHouse Gallery, Kharkiv, 1998.
View Portfolio: Gosprom Building
View Portfolio: Objects and Installations
View Portfolio: Vera Frantsevna
View Portfolio: Bed Time stories
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