Alexander Burganov. In the depths above reality. (Antique motifs in the context of creative work)

Abstract

For decades, images of antiquity have appeared in the creative work of academician Alexander Burganov. The sculptor declaratively emphasizes his focus on the cultural tradition which evolved from the cradle of Antiquity and which is, therefore, understandable to anyone who shares its humanistic ideals. The article refers to his personal exhibitions and events of the last decades: “Dreams Within Us. A Magic Crystal” at the Moscow Central House of Artists in 1987, “Magic Realism” in Germany in 1993, “Antique Motifs in Modern Sculpture” in the Burganov House Museum at which he presented his “legends and myths of Ancient Greece” in 2017, and the exhibition held in the Antique Hall in the Museum of Archeology of the Westphalian Wilhelm University of Münster in 2013. Works and cycles, never directly illustrating ancient mythology but unconsciously translating the archetypal, the transcendental through personal experience, a sensory reaction, are considered. The frequent presence of Burganov’s works of art in an “intermediate” state, in the process of transformation, which makes it easy to detect the surreal component, is their feature. Burganov’s "antique" sculptures organically exist not only in exhibition halls but also outside them - be it the courtyard of the Burganov House Museum or the square in Brussels where the sculptures in the window display of the Burganov House at the Grand Place are no less eye-catching than the monument in the same square. Noble restraint (with clearly readable spectacularity), bearing in itself, within itself, dreams and passions, reality and mysticism, gives Burganov’s "antique" images-metaphors a special feature that requires comprehension of the slow, at the same time the reasonable and the emotional in order to be able to penetrate the limits of the immanent artist’s impermeability.