Head

Wooden boxes, rope, metal
166 x 133 x 83 cm

A sculptor, he uses living materials, both fragile and ephemeral to bring visibility to a form of violence that he sees in the present day. With humour and poetry, and at times with brutality, Dimitri Tsykalov investigates the needs of our consumer society, the fragility of the world economy and the transient nature of our time on earth. Working with material taken from boxes of ammunition from all over the world, Dimitri Tsykalov cuts and modifies them, producing impressive hunting trophies (bears, lions, panthers, tigers), which comprise his series titled Skin and from which comes the sculpture Head. What clearly fascinates Dimitri Tsykalov, is the realm of carnage. And by carnage the precise meaning of term must be understood in relation to what it says of a time – whether in war or in hunting – where humans is allowed to attack the flesh to either gratify a need or urge or to simply delight in the act. It’s this obsession that makes the sculptures particularly unsettling because they could just remain as homages to the collage sculptures or construction of Schwitters. But it can be quickly understood that their status as a work of art acts as a decoy. The motifs of their fur work clearly as a realist restitution of the hide of a real animal, but also as a camouflage for the art object as it is.