Name Danja Akulin | ||
 | ||
Danja Akulin (Даня Акулин) (born 1977 in Leningrad, Russia) is a Russian visual artist.
Contents
Born and raised in Leningrad (St.Petersburg), Akulin relocated to Berlin, Germany, where he attended Berlin Academy of Arts and studied under the supervision of Georg Baselitz. Akulin rose to prominence by creating pencil drawings of large format that reinstate this genre's autonomous value. Georg Baselitz says of the artist "Danja Akulin creates conceptual drawings, which he calls 'aesthetically minimalist'. Since they come from St. Petersburg, they look different from equally conceptual art by Californian artist Ed Ruscha, for example. After looking at his pictures, it is particularly exciting to see with your own eyes how many watts are used to light a stairwell in St. Petersburg. This is what good drawings look like."
Penumbra
The word penumbra is often rendered "half-light." The Latin origin paene umbra literally means "almost shadow." In between the shadow and the light there is a zone through which we may see what is in the penumbra, but we see it with this darkened hue, and it is problematic to say weather it is illuminated or not. In "Penumbra" series the light is radiated on to what is but a partially illuminated landscape. Through this light, emotions and thoughts within the duality of darkness and brightness are visually translated. The truth exists in the "in-between" area, the penumbra.
Signs
The "Signs" series fuse painstaking external drawing with profound internal drawing. The sign—segno di Dio, the heart and sense of drawing—is the hieroglyph that unlocks all the secrets, sacred and profane. As any time-honored symbol, that same Renaissance disegno which is “the source and soul of all species of painting and the root of any science,” the tokens of the contemporary age depicted in these works are full of worth and weight. Electronic read-outs, various kinds of official emblems, elements of urban and domestic graphic design. In their original state, they are reduced and de-emotionalized, but here life, ritualistically, is breathed into exhausted, prefab forms.
Simple Things
In "Simple Things" series the focus of attention is on the graphic structure of objects, transposing them to the planning stage, to the sketching stage, and presupposes meditation by the observers. Behind extensive line movements of the pencil, behind concentrations and dilutions of light and shade – associations, sometimes free, sometimes programmed, are revealed layer by layer. The works in these series intend, albeit only to a certain extent, to liberate symbols from their binding meaning, to make them part of the history of drawing.