This Soviet artist turned photographs into 3-D art objects

A theater director by education, Kupriyanov was able to create photographs literally out of nothing. He could stop a wedding procession to persuade the bride and groom to run for the camera, taking close-up shots. 

He used not only his own photographs, but also found ones, creating installations out of them. Overexposed, divided into parts, superimposed in several layers on top of each other, frames turned into three-dimensional photo objects. 

In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of panels consisting of several photographs. For example, from a photograph of workers at one of the Moscow factories, an almost biblical work was born: ‘Do not cast me away from Your presence’. 

And he supplemented the portrait series of factory workers with the text from Pushkin's poem ‘The daylight has gone out…’.

The ‘Vladimir Kupriyanov. Return of Time’ exhibition runs at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art until November 24.

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