Centaur 100

Corner is proud to commemorate 100 years of Ernst Neizvestny with 'Centaur 100' his second solo exhibition at the gallery.

I am really happy to present this show in memory of an outstanding, significant, and admired artist, writer, and original thinker; a remarkably talented human being; a very dear friend, teacher, mentor, and colleague of mine. He would have been one hundred years old today. For this show, I selected fourteen sculptures and fourteen etchings, one drawing, and two paintings from my collection of his works and called it “Centaur 100.” Ernst actually had a sculpture named Centaur 100, so I think it is an appropriate name for his centennial, as he himself always looked and felt to me like some kind of fantastic centaur—part real human, part unreal and improbable—with highest peaks and low valleys, divine and providential, a genius and brut rogue, always poetic, always working so hard. His art is full of androgens, hermaphrodites, minotaurs, centaurs, yin-yangs, totems, sarcophagi, and Icaruses, Machine Man and Bird Woman, and one thing giving birth to the next. Hyper-interconnectivity and the Tree of Life, cracked eggs, and infinite Möbius strips—we see time flowing and forms creating new possibilities full of strange transformations.

The etchings are from the series called Fate. Ernst did a new etching a day for a year to complete this series. They are sparse, laconic, powerful, and expressive; it feels like they reveal meanings as time passes by. The sculptures come from different periods, some from the eighties and some created in the last years of his life. Each one has a unique story to tell. We see the imaginary line passing through etchings to his sculptures and paintings as if it is one continuous re-birthing, rearranging, and reconnecting magic substance capable of asking and giving generously.

It is 100 years since he was born on April 9, 1925. From the beginnings in Ekaterinburg to New York, where Ernst lived and worked, and later in Shelter Island, where he built a home and studio. We met in 1981 in his SoHo studio, and in exchange for lessons, I helped him with plaster work and such. We talked a lot, and I heard so many stories from his life experiences. I learned a lot about the making of sculpture and painting. He was my teacher, and in the beginning, I assisted him in the studio on many projects in any way I could. He inspired me to make a life in art, so I owe much to him. I became good at bronze casting, made drawing a daily habit, and worked at etching, stone carving, oil painting, and other mediums—all intriguing for me to use and to master. I do feel very fortunate and lucky for this special gift from him—of friendship and of so much more. Centaur 100 is an attempt to show a small selection of Ernst Neizvestny’s works to get a sense of the spiritual, aesthetic, and esoteric dimensions opening up for us to relate to and to contemplate.

Happy birthday, Centaur!

Text by: Jeff Bliumis

Those lucky enough to have met Ernst Neizvestny in person tended to part ways in awe. His acolytes and interlocutors were deluged with seductive paradoxes and cheeky concepts; waves of blinding figures, of speech and otherwise.

Ernst Neizvestny conjured a whirlwind of words within his sculpted and sculptured habitat. Here they lived in the flesh, even if it was made of bronze. Artistic concepts born here, ideological and mutable, mature and writhe, at odds with itself, reaching performative glories then perishing and resurrecting. This is the stuff of life in the sculptural realm, our experience of art’s evolution across eras, captured in tons of metal.

Neizvestny’s abstract masterpieces are goliaths no bigger than a thought. They are no less realistic than a dream and only as dramatic as history.

While the heroes from Dante and Raul Wallenberg borrowed by Neizvestny have triumphs and struggles, they never are degraded nor humiliated. While in their shadow, it is impossible not to stand a bit straighter.

Text by: Alexander Genis

Ernst Neizvestny is an international artist known for, among others, the Assuan monument in Egypt and the tombstone of Nikita Chrusjtjov.  He was commissioned to make the grave monument despite an argument he had with Chrusjtjov almost a decade earlier at his exhibition at the Manezh in Moscow, 1962. Since the mid 90’s Neizvestny has made a number of monumental sculptures in Russia.  In 2004 his 6 meter high, gilded bronze sculpture Tree of Life was inaugurated at the newly built Bagration Bridge Financial Centre in Moscow.

The Ernst Neizvestny museum dedicated to his art work was opened in Yekaterinburg, the city of his birth, on his 88th birthday April 9, 2013.

Ernst Neizvestny died in 2016 in New York.

Text by: Galleri Astley