Europe
Sanya Kantarovsky
Wrong Currency (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday)
2015
Wrong Currency (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday), 2015
1 OF 5
Wrong Currency (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) uses the stylistic vernacular of five separate artists to create a series of five lithographs, dealing with a series of apparently unrelated happenings, each staged as one “day.” The series takes up Sanya Kantarovsky’s theme of embarrassment across a variety of scenes, each populated by multiple figures, set in a disjunctive relation. The visual forms are brought into conversation through their shared emotional cadence. Kantarovsky proposes an affective affinity beyond style or subject matter.
Artist and curator Sanya Kantarovsky works across mediums to grapple with embarrassment and shame, emphasizing alienation through exposure of that which is deeply personal. The figures portrayed in the artist's work are caught in the midst of vulnerability, and interact directly with the edges of the medium at hand, as well as the other denizens of Kantarovsky’s compositions. The works contain a dark humor reminiscent of the occasionally melancholy modern Eastern European literary aesthetic, but also references figures both canonical and on the periphery of art history. As such, Kantarovsky uses this uncanny sense of embarrassment to both refer to his regional heritage, as well as cast a similarly uneasy shadow over the works from which he draws inspiration.