First Rider & Angels-Demons

Info

Angels-Demons Sculptures

Concept

Info

2007

2009–2012

8 fiberglass and steel sculptures with polymer enamel paint

Angels-Demons Sculptures

First Rider (2007)
Angels-Demons (Big version, 2009)
Angels-Demons (Small version, 2009-2012)

Concept

First Rider, a singular sculpture, along with the larger Angels-Demons series which it heralds, both consist of large-scale fiberglass, steel, and enamel structures, drenched in shining black polymer paint and standing over 6 meters in height (3D modeling by Roman Ivanyuchenko). Re-interpreting the prophecy of St. John from the Book of Revelation, First Rider proposes an apocalypse not presaged through the appearance of the prototypical male image of the Antichrist or Figure of Conquest of an indeterminate middle age atop a white steed. Instead, it portends an apocalypse heralded by the arrival of a giant sui generis toddler of pan-Asiatic countenance and Pop Art appeal, confidently astride what could equally be a vicious prehistoric predator or a child’s toy: a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which consequently also recalls the Whore of Babylon. Appearing two years before Angels-Demons, First Rider draws strongly on the history of the monument as a signifying category: the heroic and funerary symbolism of the equestrian statuary, encapsulated here in a classic pose, while at the same time stripped of every pretense to represent power, despite the title, due to the sheer absurdity of its presentation. However, First Rider was more specifically first exhibited in direct juxtaposition to a celebrated monument of Emperor Alexander III by Paolo Trubetskoy at the State Russian Museum on the occasion of the artists’ mid-career retrospective, thus suggesting a more retrospective terror exerted by a figure of irrationality upon representatives of state power and control.

 

Aesthetically akin to First Rider, the Angels-Demons series of seven monumental sculptures discloses both bodies of work as part of the same alternative cosmogony, as sculptural embodiments of a primordial, ambivalent force that cannot be identified through conventional axiological categories. The Angels-Demons have acquired hybrid animal qualities, possessing both the wings of a bat and the tail of a lizard. Indistinguishable as male or female, angel or demon, good or evil, these figures of the grotesque and absurd propose that the apocalypse will arrive not by way of rapture, revelation, or death but rather through the birth of a horrifying and puerile indeterminacy, and thus destructive of any clear dichotomies including that of Self and Other. Angels-Demons was also produced as a set of seven works at domestic size and as a jewelry collection commissioned by the Sakha Diamond company.

 

First Rider premiered at the State Russian Museum in 2007 and was subsequently shown at the solo exhibition AES+F. Il Paradiso Verde... at MACRO Future in Rome in 2008. The following year it was displayed at the NordArt Festival in Büdelsdorf, Germany, among other venues. Angels-Demons was first included in its entirety in the lille3000 festival Europe XXL in Lille, France in 2009 together with First Rider, and was later shown in fragments at the Melbourne Festival in Australia in 2011, the Helsinki Art Museum in Finland in 2013, and the 6th Sculpture Triennial in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland in 2015, as well as elsewhere.