Artist
2016

While creating his most recent series of works, made out of painted plaster, Povzner decided to start from scratch and literally shut himself up in his studio, focusing on his own private and professional life and the elements that constitute his daily ritual: rest, recreation, work, the armchair in which he sometimes spends the entire day, his car (a large pickup that can hold everything a sculptor needs), the all-too-familiar places in the Kitay-gorod area of Moscow, and elements of the local landscape such as the security barrier and arch through which he has passed thousands of times. Taken together, these pieces of reality constitute a spatial hybrid that tells an intelligible story which anyone—from a child to the most sophisticated adult—can relate to. Povzner says that, while working on this project, he focused particularly on the relationship between sculpture and architecture and between space and its content and framework. The result is a unity of sculpture and architectural elements: the logic of Classical Greek architecture unfolds in the description of the life of a Moscow artist; a pickup turns into an arch; and an armchair combines with the artist’s home.

Katya Inozemtseva


Installation view of Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art,
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2017

Photo: Yuri Palmin © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art