Yesterday we looked at Man Ray. Today is day two of 5 Days of Photography and we’re looking at Kiev photographer, (spray) painter and video artist Sasha Kurmaz. We often look at people who are long-dead on Examining the Odd, so it’s nice to look at a fresh, living artist! By the way, if you’re a fresh, living artist or writer and would like to see your work on the blog, please get in touch.

Sasha uses his work to highlight current political struggles in Ukraine, urging for civil rights awareness. He also travels the world, collaborating with other artists. As well as being an exhibiting artist, Sasha has also taken pictures for numerous magazines, including Vice and Disturber.

No one can deny that 27 year old Sasha Kurmaz as a hard working and versatile, successful artist. His realistic, and by times shocking way of making people into objects is just as interesting as the brain behind the operation. – A Virtual Aesthetic

Kurmaz pinpoints precise episodes from his personal life, mapping both the material world and ephemeral events through his image streams. In the process, he pushes at the boundaries between society and the individual, questioning how such affiliations are expressed. While fully capable of operating autonomously, his photographs take on new connotations and narrative continuity within the artist’s combinations and sequences; each image appears as a continuation of the previous one, building into a larger whole the way a house is built of single bricks, or a book from pages. The artist’s primary objective is to uncover the process through which identity is formed, and social connections and relationships are forged between the younger generations in post-Soviet society… Among the most significant events in his career there is his participation at Pinchuk Art Center Prize exhibition in 2013, when he was selected as a finalist. – Gallery Triangle

sashakurmaz.com

Above: 48 Hours in Kyiv By Sasha Kurmaz By Eytys

It amazes me how different Sasha Kurmaz’s work can be! The strength of colour ties them all together though. During my research for this post, I don’t think I saw a single image duplicated!

“Even the normal world is ‘super natural’ to me. Look at the sun, what a miracle every day! It sounds cliché but I love to look at the stars and the moon, listening to the song of silence. I also think all the prosperity is ‘super natural’, we just don’t realize it. We lost the ability to see it and appreciate it… I just think my work has a expiery date, a very short one. I actually need to update it again soon but I am to busy all the time… My work is a tool for everything I want to show. I think today people are starting to realize the don’t have to take in everything from the government, people start to speak up… I liek to be alone and listen to the sounds of space. You have to try it… Travel as much as you can, that is the best inspiration… Watch the ‘Paradise Trilogy’ by Ulrich Seidl. It’s absurd and realistic at the same time. It intreges and inspires me endlessly at the moment.” – Sasha Kurmaz in an interview with A Virtual Aesthetic

Above: © Sasha Kurmaz 2010/11. Untitled, from the series “red constructor”

Sasha Kurmaz has a book called Nude Sensitivity, published by Atem Books in 2011.

Above: Sasha Kurmaz: “red constructor” (2010/11)

Above: © Sasha Kurmaz 2011 “sweet soviet candy”