Jul 10, 20233 min read

Inner Landscape Membranes - art series by KAWARGA

Updated: Nov 30, 2023

Inner Landscape Membranes is the latest series by Dmitry Kawarga. For a long time, Dmitry has been referring to the topics of apocalypse and wreckage of the world — as if foreboding the on-coming changes. Today, when the very concept of global order collapsing, Kawarga suggests that we should reflect on our roots through introspection.

The artist believes that a natural landscape is a place where memories and history are stored. Fleeing from the city and setting out on travel across woods and fields of the North, Kawarga projects his inner data formations to the natural sceneries." Endless flames of events, the historical epos, and stories of people’s everyday life, images of writers and scientists, tragic stories about particular people and entire generations, victims of wars, revolutions, and repressions, sophisticated mechanisms and childhood dreams — all of these seem to be filled in a unique glimmering multidimensionality that my eyes can see", the artist explains.

The project is a story about the fusion of cultural and natural matters. It is the synthesis that the artist uses to decode our civilization’s origins, enciphered in the environment, whether in the bends and curves of fallen trees’ roots or in the calmness of Russian wetlands. Cultural knowledge falls onto the environment, thus creating exterior and inner landscapes.

The series includes paintings from the new cycle — Inner Landscape Membranes. The artist presents the conventional concept of landscape paintings in it, cutting through the canvases and inhabiting them with recognizable Kawargian matters, inner landscape inserts. The works feature a genre combination — they are no longer paintings and, yet, they are not sculptures. They are more like materialized fragments of the artist’s mental processes, impressions, and shatters of his take on the world.

Dmitry Kawarga was born in Moscow in 1972. Starting his career in art among Moscow nonconformists, the artist found a recognizable style in biomorphic sculptures and interactive installations. A large cycle of works is based on the synthesis of art and technology created in collaboration with scientists, programmers, and engineers.

Dmitry Kawarga is a mysterious artist. He says: "The artist's personality is inseparable from his creative process." It means that the viewer does not have to know the artist personally; it is enough to be familiar with his works, which are his best representations.

"I like to think of myself as an experimental researcher who exists inside his experiments and can materialize invisible psychophysiological processes, embodying their three-dimensional projections into reality".

Dmitry Kawarga began his career with traditional painting, which gradually became more voluminous and finally turned into sculpture. Further experiments and research led him to create interactive robotic sculptures and installations. The artist creates his biomorphic sculptures from polymers, which can be given any shape. Sometimes, old works that he has lost interest in, Kawarga breaks into pieces and turns into new bodies. Thus, his works go through several cycles of reincarnation.

Despite the scientific and academic nature of his work, Dmitry Kawarga does not look like a science-obsessed “mad professor”, but rather the opposite. The artist lives in the suburbs of Moscow, calls his sculpture house - "Kawarga Hall", and he has many pets, mostly dogs, who live in his yard surrounded by and inside many street sculptures.