Anton Zolotov Cotton Duck

About

Historically Anton’s methodology has been a sort of reverse archaeology, taking found objects, streetside ephemera, and castaway materials, burying them in resin, tape, and household paint out of which emerged new paintings. With little or no differentiation between subject and surface, fundamental abstracted forms combined with the detritus of a post-industrial consumerist society; the collision of the ideal and the banal bound, taped, and embalmed.

Broadly speaking Anton has continued in this direction to make these new works. He has introduced cotton duck and other fabrics as the building blocks and experimented with alternative ways of applying paint.  In terms of installation the stuff of each work - the fabric - has in most cases been torn apart, sewn back up and then stretched, assuming an almost uncomfortable tensile position. For Anton this is where the work settles into its life as a new object, and provides the artist his moment of truth.

"When I mess with materials and something interesting comes up somewhere along the line, anyone can get into that, because there's something very human about those moments, we find these surprises in our everyday lives, here and there, on the way to work, at the coffee shop, coming home, the rest...I like that, it's for everyone in that way"

Each work has taken as its original unit the domestic door and so these works can be seen as scaled to the human body despite their sometimes monumental size. The two doors installed at the front of the gallery have been scrubbed down and mounted and serve as a worthy souvenir of the streets outside to which this exhibition pays tribute, and in some ways the path Anton has travelled to find the installation we are able to experience here.