The de Menil Gallery Archive

“Head On” by Sergei Isupov

January 7–March 3, 2016

Ceramist Sergei Isupov has returned to the form of the head throughout his career, using it both as physical object and a way to convey a narrative.

The work acknowledges the enduring force of the head and its counterpart, the face, in art, from Renaissance portraits to today’s pop culture iconography. Isupov wants onlookers to contemplate the head and imagine the invisible body.

The images he creates are literal and metaphorical. “The subject matter I address on the surface through painted images draws from multilateral information that passes out of our brains, our heads, as stories first experienced, then stored, and finally told,” says the artist, who has created heads miniature and colossal, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. “The viewer who considers these stories then completes the circle by making connections to these images and what they suggest based on their own knowledge and experiences.”
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