Yuri Kuper: The Sea

September 23, 1999 - November 06, 1999

Yoshii Gallery is pleased to announce The Sea by Yuri Kuper.  This exhibition will be on view from September 23 through November 6, 1999.

Yuri Kuper, born in Moscow in 1940, has exhibited extensively throughout the world.  Some of his major exhibitions include, in 1993 at the Toulon Museum, in 1995 at the Pushkine Museum, and in 1999 at the Sainsbury Center for the Visual Arts in Norwich.  This is his third one-man show in Yoshii Gallery in New York.

In this show the public will appreciate different approaches to a specific theme by Mr. Kuper, ranging from his paintings on found objects like pieces of rumpled sheet metal, worn wooden boxes, rough-surfaced curbstones, printed cardboard scraps, to his infinitely poetic acrylics on photographic glass plates.

In this series Yuri Kuper explores the theme of the sea.  A sea that surrounds the individual, a sea that lets him flow and travel and at the same time sets him limits.  That sea is reinvented by Mr. Kuper in a dramatic palimpsest that transforms its true image for the one that he desires.  In this exhibition Mr. Kuper presents images layered with veils of blues, blacks and fine hues of gray, that both recreate the seascape and transform it.  Yuri Kuper’s seascapes start to suggest to us something both fantastic and real.  He translates the waves, the sand, the rocks, and the light reflected in the tense waters in a fluid calligraphy, a distinctive language of intimacy and passion.

Yuri Kuper plays with the notion of the ideal place, this fantastic place that avoids being recognized.  A sea that has been concentrated in an alchemy of color, and that can be read as simultaneously nostalgic and turbulent.  The art critic John Yau in his essay about the artist concludes: “Kuper’s seascapes are meditations on time, on both its relentless and its stillness, and the cold sense of isolation that it often evokes in each of us.”

Additional information and images are available from the gallery upon request.  A catalogue, with an essay by John Yau, accompanies the show.