Sanya Kantarovsky

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

I like the word Masoretic but feel

Disinclined to use it in a sentence

Scrying instead my platelets

And bad dreams. Something

Keeps sleeping against

Me that is not the person

Beside me. By “against”

I mean against. My lack

Of beauty was supposed

To be some fault of my own.

They would have had me believe

This entire “democracy” was an inner defect

Bartering my hooked nose against

Your virtuosity I walked the line

Between pity and horror having come

Here for one reason and one reason only:

To have become at last American.

“They Dream Only Of America” is a poem

By John Ashbery. I gratefully received a bequest

Of his collection of pornography and a very

Ugly chair. But you must tell no one these facts

There are things I was told I’d have to take

To my grave. For I toil in a public place

Using an invisible medium employed by all

But subtracted, in my hands and in my mouth

From common use. And scorned by all

I yet remain here. Why, you ask?

Curiosity

-Ariana Reines

@arianareines

Capitain Petzel is thrilled to announce its first exhibition with Sanya Kantarovsky, featuring a selection of the artist's most recent watercolors. Teeming with wry humor and unearthly narratives, Kantarovsky’s watercolors propose scenarios of turmoil and investigate liminal spaces, physical proximities, affect, and cruelty. His sometimes delicate and often repulsive subjects grapple with the confines of their bodies, interacting with one another in a painterly satire of status anxiety and existential crises. Willfully engaging the historical canon of painting and literature, Kantarovsky perverts tropes and archetypes with elements gleaned from more populist forms of visual culture such as cartoons, illustration, film and advertising. Kantarovsky’s paintings are assembled through fits and starts, with layered abrasions and dispersions of material, resulting in surfaces that engender a productive delay in looking and seeing.

Kantarovsky has recently had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.  He will be also included in the 2nd Garage Triennale of Russian Contemporary Art, taking place at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow in 2020. Recent group shows include Radical Figures, Whitechapel Gallery, London; GIVE UP THE GHOST, Baltic Triennial 13, Vilnius; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, Jewish Museum, New York; The Eccentrics, Sculpture Center, New York. Kantarovsky’s works are held in many collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

For Frozen Dress (Part One) visit Modern Art.

For Frozen Dress (Part Two) visit Luhring Augustine.