The Naked Room presents common project of Anna Scherbyna and Serhiy Sabakar composed of several series of various years. Exhibited in one space their works are united by concepts of “ruins”, “romanticism”, “landscape” and “sublime”.
“A Few Landscapes of Left-bank Ukraine” by Anna Scherbyna is a series of miniature watercolours depicting half- or completely ruined houses in the East of Ukraine. The scale of the image does not really allow for the ruin to be seen and identified. And because of this these landscapes reveal themselves as lyrical rather than dramatic. The works are exhibited covered with a cloth—the traditional way of protection of fragile artworks used in many museums.
“Rupture” by Serhiy Sabakar is a series of monumental drawings, made after screenshots of Google-walks along popular tourist routes in Western Europe. These works look at people who are engaged in looking at themselves. When these scenes are captured by a mobile camera, the landscape remains intact, while people collapse into pieces. Capturing this human debris the artist brings these images back to reality.
The Naked Room curators Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German comment, “Anna and Serhiy’s project bring us back to pressing matters that become yet more elusive, but never actually withdraw from our lives. These are the war, decay and more—nonchalance and amnesia of “ordinary citizens” , for whom the everyday is merely a media image. This project combines aesthetic and critical and illustrates an important for our approach to making art politically rather than about politics”.
