Ivan Lebedev, photo-artist
Born in 1959. Graduated from the Sechenov First Moscow Medical State University. He achieve his PhD in psychiatry in 1993, and then chose to leave science on the back burner, focusing his attention instead on the realization of his vast artistic abilities, which were of greater personal value to him.
At the dawn of perestroika he worked briefly as an advertisement photographer, but quickly abandoned that field of work due to the underdeveloped state of advertisement infrastructure in the USSR, and a general lack of demand for advertisements in the half-starved beginning of post-Soviet democratic reforms.
Afterwards he founded a successfully functioning business, selling retro and vintage Soviet-era antiques online. He is involved in this to this day, by his own desire and to provide funding for his life, travels and photographic work. He lives and works in Moscow, but travels the world freely. In most recent years he has spent his free time in New Haven, CT, engaging in experimental photography. In 1989, 1990 and 1991, author held personal exhibits and partook in collective ones in Moscow (USSR), Vilnius (Lithuania) and France. In 1990 he joined the UNESCO International Federation of Artists (Moscow division of “photo and graphics”). He spent those years in the company of informal underground Moscow artists, largely clashing with them conceptually.
He spent the next twenty years of his life out of the artistic limelight, creating, sifting through and accumulating his best material, not showcasing them in any way to avoid clashing with perestroika-era trends. Ivan Lebedev is an artist that studies the boundaries of traditional photography as it overlaps with other forms of visual art; especially painting, particularly in the areas of time flow within frames, plasticity in photo-image features, artifacts in film photography and the technological abilities of traditional and digital printing. In other words, the author uses photography as a mere medium; a self-serving form of expression in the context of 20th century traditional visual art.
According to the author, the fundamental difference between photography and painting lies in three underpinnings of time characteristic of photographic images: fixation of a concrete moment, time-flow within the frame and the marks of natural wear on the physical printed form of the image and its texture. The author takes relatively few photographs, and is additionally very strict about his choice of what to exhibit, finding it unnecessary to inundate the artistically broad and media-rich modern world with insignificant images. There have been times when he did not publicise more than 5 images within a single year. Each fruit of his labour is either the result of deep thought on the nature of time or the result of an instantaneous captivation by a place.
The author can be called a “photographic hooligan” attempting to walk along the boundaries of photographic art to get a feel for its edges. Oftentimes a particular project calls for the purchase of special photographic technology, which is used once; however, it’s more accurate to say that the meticulous study of vintage equipment inspires the author to decide how best to utilize it. The author says that he can even take a photo using a matchbox, but that is a bit of a postmodernistic exaggeration. The digital era has brought new challenges for artists, with photo-technology’s omnipresence in the masses and the swift increase of photoproduction and “visual noise” in everyday life, which forces photographers to be even more selective in their choice of presented work and adopt an even more creative approach to the presentation of their visionary prospects.
The author’s primary goal is to visualize the setting, not conceptualize it. The author’s latest projects in 2010-2011 utilize a technique in digital technology that he calls “sliced panorama”, and a David Hockney-inspired form of printing that he has dubbed “patchwork printing”, which resembles a collage in its final form. The author’s greatest influences have been artists such as Josef Sudek, David Hockney, August Zander, Sebastiano Salgado, Andy Warhol, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lisitsky, but this influence has been largely mediated, without direct visible parallels. They have been beacons that the author has used to orient himself in his understanding of visual media handling.
Ivan Lebedev’s work always arouses emotions in the viewer; oftentimes polar ones, from complete visceral rejection to awed enchantment. They are impossible to pass by. When you look at Lebedev’s art, you can try to pick out the characteristics of the mental curator that are woven into the photo artist’s work.
LINK to ARTIST STATEMENT and EXHIBITIONS LOG
PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE EVENTS of 2012:
2012 Dec 13... Mimi Ferzt Gallery, Very Mixed Media, Group exhibition NYC, NY, USA
2012 Oct 13...31 Bright Visions, Museum of Russian Art, Group exhibition Jersey City, NJ, USA
2012 Aug 08...16 International Art Festival / MoRA, Collective exhibition Jersey City, NJ, USA
2012 July 26... Mimi Ferzt Gallery, The Lenin Project. Personal exhibition NYC, NY, USA
2012 Apr..June Galiara Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA
2012 Apr 02...30 Amsterdam Whitney Gallery, NYC, NY, USA
2012 Mar 22...25 Art Expo New York, Pier 92, SOLO booth 1012 NYC, NY, USA
2012 Feb 09...27 Mimi Ferzt Gallery, Extraordinary Portraits. Extraordinary Artists. NYC, NY, USA