On March 16 Kyiv’s Bereznitsky Aesthetics gallery saw the opening of “Entity,” the first personal exhibition by Bob Basset in all 30 years of the studio’s operation.
Most art objects exhibited at the gallery have never been previously displayed all at once, and as such present a continuous history of Bob Basset Art Studio. The Techno-Romanticist things created during the 30-year history of the studio have been loaned by private collectors. Most of them arrived from abroad. Over the recent years, the art studio’s objects have been exhibited in Paris, Milano, Hong Kong, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, London, and New York.
Now they have been brought to Ukraine through the efforts of the Bereznitsky Aesthetics gallery and its curator Vlad Zvarych. The exhibition comprises objects created in 2004–2017, including the celebrated Dragon Backpack, Makar the Pathfinder doll, the push-toy, the steampunk Dog, and others.
“They don’t imitate anything or anyone, they basically create their own alternative worlds similar to ours and then show the various ways they could develop,” says Bereznitsky Aesthetics director Yevhen Bereznitsky. “Their worlds are phantasmagorical and disturbing, but they are still similar to our one, even in their jarring but oh-so-familiar fusion of military technological aspects and an amazing lyricism. It’s an authentic—and, importantly, a perfectly executed—attempt to contemplate the relationship between humans and the world, simultaneously reasonable and utopian.”