According to the artist himself, the works to be exhibited this autumn are all new. “I’m not old enough yet to have old works,” he says.
At present, Vitaliy is working with concrete. He is interested in the material for its “materiality” — in the artist’s view, works made of concrete look more complete, more real. “In this respect, concrete resembles stone, marble.”
Some of the works to be presented at the exhibition are still being refined and completed by the artist, so even he does not yet know exactly what the exhibition will look like. “Right now I’m working on concrete reliefs, but by the end of the summer I may take up something else.”
The reliefs that currently occupy all of Vitaliy’s time are his way, on the one hand, of exploring the possibilities of the material and, on the other, of exploring the world around him and himself.
The artist spoke about one of the works that will be featured in the exhibition. The combination of the motifs of a seashell and a human (male) ear is very organic. But during the creative process, Vitaliy felt the need to add a female figure as well. This means that any work can change as it is being created, and what we see now may well look completely different by September. Incidentally, the artist says of this particular work: “At first I tried to sculpt my own ear, but it turned out to be very inconvenient. Then I began asking friends who stopped by my studio to be my ‘ear’ models. That was when I realized just how different everyone’s ears are.”