{"id":103408,"date":"2025-05-27T15:52:46","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T13:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.artsupp.com\/a-chat-with-the-artist-alexey-morosov\/"},"modified":"2025-05-27T15:52:46","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T13:52:46","slug":"a-chat-with-the-artist-alexey-morosov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.artsupp.com\/en\/a-chat-with-the-artist-alexey-morosov\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chat with the Artist Alexey Morosov"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We read in an interview that you consider yourself somewhat of an heir to Hellenistic culture. In your sculptures, you often reference ancient myths that you then reinterpret. What draws you to the ancient world?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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I consider myself an heir to Hellenistic civilization primarily because I was born in the geographical location that was the final stop on Alexander the Great’s long journey of conquest and expansion to the East. There, the great sovereign left a mark that is not only latent, and in popular culture \u2013 where he is called Eskander \u201cwith two horns,\u201d referring to the shape of the helmet he wore \u2013 the feeling of belonging to that ancient lineage is still prevalent.<\/p>\n\n\n

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On a more visual and artistic heritage level, I admit that I have always been fascinated by the remnants of that ancient culture that have emerged in Afghanistan (Badakhshan), Pakistan, and India. I remember being overwhelmed by the discovery of Gandhara sculptures like the head of Prince Siddhartha, in the collection of George Ortiz, where the hand and technique, the language, are fully Hellenic while on the anthropological level there is no doubt that we are facing an Eastern statue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am ethnically Russian, so I have inherited Hellenism by birth, which has also passed through us via the Eastern Roman Empire and particularly through Byzantine visual civilization. I find it interesting, and in its way also ironic, that the great classical lesson has been distorted since the 1930s under the weight of Stalinist aesthetics, which placed great value on national, local decorative motifs specific to the socialist republics.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I grew up in Bishkek, which was previously called Frunze, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, surrounded by plastic and architectural examples of classical origin but refined, integrated with elements specific to Kyrgyz tradition. It is not absurd, for example, to find all the parts that make up the classical entablature at the top of a building in the center of Bishkek, which, while respecting the Greek composition, is adorned with motifs from the Islamic visual world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a saying in Russia: history tends to repeat itself, but the second time it repeats as farce. The communists, whom we could define as pseudo-Hellenes, are the second farcical time after the first time of Alexander the Great, in full agreement with the popular definition! And what we see today could almost be called a postmodern Neo-Hellenism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for me, I consider myself a Hellenist and not a Hellenic; for me, the ancient world is not something external to look at or return to, it is my primordial soup, the unique and natural dimension from which my creations come and that I see around me as a spontaneous interpretative filter that conditions and qualifies every perception I have.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Besides ancient culture, are there other artistic models from which you draw inspiration?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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There certainly are. I have always greatly admired Carlo Scarpa, whom I consider a genius and a true point of reference for me. I am also an architect, and my public art involves constructing space as well as the work itself. Carlo Scarpa taught me to manage the relationship between the two aspects, much like the Russian artistic avant-gardes and the constructivist movement, which in my view is linked to the subsequent outcomes of deconstructivism that matured in Europe and America, facilitated here by technological evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last but not least, I am a great lover of cinema, a true addict, and I consider it a powerful and rich source of inspiration. When I think of my twenties, directors like Yasujir\u014d Ozu or Dziga Vertov come to mind, whose films I could still watch endlessly today, because for me cinema is primarily image, an optical and visual dimension, where the plot is the compendium of a wonder that captures the gaze before the attention on the story. I feel the same way about Lars Von Trier or Stanley Kubrick; their films for me are sequences of paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have beautiful memories from the 1990s in Moscow, where there was an art house cinema that screened films in their original language, always empty, where you entered with a ticket at a symbolic price; it was called Illusion and was inside one of the Stalinist skyscrapers. There, I saw Orson Welles’ \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d for the first time, unforgettable, and thinking back to that place, the definition of a cinematic museum spontaneously arises today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of cinema and \u010cyngyz Aitmatov, among the films that have most influenced my creative paths, I cannot forget \u201cThe First Teacher\u201d by Andrei Konchalovsky, from 1965, inspired by a story from the great Kyrgyz writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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