Sergey Bratkov
Sergey Bratkov (born in 1960 in Kharkiv) is a visual artist who works with politically charged contexts using various media such as painting, photography, installation, video and performance. He became interested in photography in the 1970s and began experimenting in the 1980s, making collages and objects. From 1988 to 1993 he was part of a group of artists called “Litera A” and created semi-figurative paintings. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the “Fast Reaction Group” together with the photographers Boris Mikhailov, Vita Mikhailova and Sergey Solonsky. They created provocative campaigns, objects and photo series. In 1993 Bratkov founded the gallery “Up/Down” in his studio in Kharkiv, which lasted until 1997. After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he left Russia, where he was teaching art as a professor of the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow. He moved to Germany in 2022 and is now continuing his career from Berlin.
UNTITLED
2025
Foam, Acryl
The hole creates a space that exists between the viewer and the presumed event – neither recognizable nor unknown, neither familiar nor strange. The violence committed upon the object evokes a multitude of associations. A visual trap that is a physical (or visual?) experience of losing balance for the viewer, touching upon both physical and social vulnerability. Geometric order is interrupted by emptiness; the human striving for rationality is cut short by the force of erosion and destruction. Against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine, viewers’ backgrounds play a key role in how they perceive the hole. Do they see it as a mark of shelling or a drone attack on the wounded landscape, or is it just an everyday object with traces of accidental damage?