Russian journey with Konstantin Gladkov
Numerous artistic activities, hard to label under any one category, are attributable to the name Konstantin Gladkov. He is a performer, he produces a popular online magazine, does street art, is a designer and creates fonts and many other things. He is going to continue it, he decided to be an artist without a category as he himself has often declared.
After coming to the attention of the public with the actual social posters and prints in 2018, Konstantin Glagkov has actually never stopped. Everything interests him, from gallery exhibitions to digital art, and in common with many others like himself worldwide he is equally good at all of them.
A very clear principle lies at the heart of Mr. Gladkov work: there is no signboard, public art, Street Art, without a message. And this conviction goes so deep that you don’t understand, is it an artist's work, or it is just a pumpkin, which is going to be sold by grandmother.
Shocking impressive was a wall with ads in the «ENTOGARPHICAL JOURNEY» exhibition, a form a single poetic narrative about the life of a Russian. Traditionally, handwritten advertisements and funny signs are excluded from the cultural field, but the author explores with interest and considers such artifacts as a part of the modern Russian identity.
The writing in Russian with a lot of marks plays on the ambivalence of the site where the image used to be displayed.
But it also harks back to the rhetoric of international cooperation where some phrases are enunciated with persuasive and oratorical facility, and then its meaning disappears when international diplomacy and foreign policies of the various countries take action and decide.
Works by Konstantin Gladkov can be viewed by following instagram: @kungfuct
txt by P.I. Sherstyukovy
