Chapter 7: Working with pictures: Kozlov, Richter, and Sherman

It is Kozlov’s artistic practise of transforming an image in successive stages that makes his approach to photography unique, rather than the use of his own pictures in the context of portraiture, as such. This becomes evident when we compare Kozlov’s use of photography with that of two other artists, Cindy Sherman and Gerhard Richter, who pursued similar approaches with classical photography. Classical photography means that we will restrict ourselves to concepts applied before the age of digital technologies.  

Thus, Cindy Sherman is best known for producing metamorphosed pictures of herself, but she transformed herself before the picture was taken, and with the picture, the process of transformation stopped (digital techniques now allow her to continue this process). As we have seen, Kozlov continued the transformation of the portrayed after he took the picture and carried this process forward through a number of stages, each finished work being a potential source image for a new, different image.

Just as E-E Kozlov, Gerhard Richter, in his early working period, used a number of photographs – many taken by himself – as motifs for his paintings. Reproductions of these photographs and the paintings related to them are available on Richter’s website, on a page dedicated to his “Atlas”, a collection 802 sheets (at present) which, as we are informed “Spanning a period of almost four decades, the individual sheets reflect different phases of Richter's life and work”. The text continues:

Although Gerhard Richter had already begun collecting photographs and press cuttings, he started working on Atlas in the early 1970s by arranging his own and other family photographs on paper.
Subsequent to these photographs, he included pictures taken from newspapers and magazines, some of which he used as source images for his 1960s photo paintings [e.g. Sheets 5-15][1]

When we follow the links from the photographs to the paintings (the website calls the latter associated works), we notice that Richter adapted each photograph in its integrity and kept the motifs without major changes. His main stylistic device is that of blurring a motif after he painted it, distorting it by stroking the brush over the still wet oil paint. He thereby created a shallow depth of field, “placing” the objects on a plane where they all are out of focus – an effect computer programmes achieve with the help of editing filters. Like Sherman, Richter stopped having reached the first step in a transformation process, that is, always created exactly one painting from one photograph, but never a new painting from a previous painting. This makes sense: after all, when applying the blurring technique in successive paintings, you will soon reach abstraction, and your subject matter will eventually become a grey even surface. 

While Richter is distancing himself from the subject matter by blurring it – in a romantic gesture, like that of 19^th century impressionists – Sherman is committing herself to the subject matter, defining it further. In this respect, Kozlov is closer to Sherman than to Richter, although in his work, painting and drawing prevails. On the other hand, Kozlov’s portraiture isn’t a game of guises and role-plays – a mise en scene, like Sherman’s. With regard to his Portrait of Timur Novikov with Arms Consisting of Bones, the artist explained his position in 2010, eight years after Novikov had died at the age of forty-three:

To be more precise, it is not Timur that is portrayed in this painting from 1988, but the state of being which he eventually attained.[2]

This observation brings us back to Warburg, more exactly, to his concept of the artistic-spiritual transformation of an object and, accordingly, to the question of the nature of such an object.

next page : Chapter 8. Transformation and transfiguration

Introduction: E-E Kozlov’s photo archive as part of the his Atlas of Ontology

Part 1. The Atlas of Ontology - collages

Chapter 1. Aby Warburg's cosmography and E-E Kozlov's cosmogony

Chapter 2. From movie to mythology: changing emotive formulas

Chapter 3. The travelogue of a pair of strawberries

Part 2. The Atlas of Ontology - photographs

Chapter 4. From picture to painting: portraits of Timur Novikov and other New Artists

Chapter 5. An image not based on likeness: Shark

Chapter 6. Seeing colours in a black and white picture (forthcoming)

Chapter 7: Working with pictures: Kozlov, Richter, and Sherman

Chapter 8. Transformation and transfiguration

Chapter 9. From Abbild to Urbild (forthcoming)

Research / text / layout: Hannelore Fobo, January / February 2021.

Uploaded 15 February 2021
Last updated 18 May 2024