#rene block

Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky: The Day Before Tomorrow (1999)

Svetlana Kopystiansky: Projects

Igor Kopystiansky: Projects

Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky: Archive Documents

Video. Vimeo

Video. YouTube

Bibliography

Books by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky

Works by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are represented in permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art  in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Musée National d'Art Moderne Center Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France; Tate Modern, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia; Folkwang Museum in Essen; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen; Berlinische Galerie; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; MUMOK Vienna, Austria; Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; Frac Corsica, France; MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Poland; Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Poland.(Svetlana); Muzeum Sztuki Lodz (Igor); The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. Vilnius, Lithuania.

Archives by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are located at the Centre Pompidou, Kandinsky Library.

Works by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky were exhibited at venues including: MoMA, New York; Center Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern London; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Center Pompidou Metz; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, France; Tate Liverpool; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Fine Arts Center UMass, Amherst, Massachusetts; MMK Frankfurt/Main; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf;  Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Kunst-Werke; S.M.A.K. Gent; GAMeC, Bergamo;  Museum of Modern Art EMMA, Finland;  AGNSW, Sydney;  MARCO, Vigo, Spain; MUMOK, Vienna and others.

Invitation card. Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel. 2005

Works exhibited in Kassel:

Room 1: "Establishing shot." (2004/5) video installation at 8 monitors. http://www.flickr.com/photos/artexh/6577911583/in/photostream/

Room 2: "Incidents." (1996/7) video/sound installation

Room 3: "The Day before Tomorrow." (1999) two screen slide projection installation. 216 slide program. http://www.flickr.com/photos/artexh/6577909915/in/photostream/

Room 4: "526." Six screen slide projection installation (2005) http://www.flickr.com/photos/artexh/6577910279/in/photostream/

Room 5: "Yellow Sound." (2005) Video installation http://www.flickr.com/photos/artexh/6577909335/in/photostream/

The Day Before Tomorrow Svetlana und Igor Kopystiansky 21 December 2005 – 26 February 2006

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, organised in collaboration with the gallery of the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focuses for the first time on video works and installations by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. In addition to early works like Incidents (1996-1997) or The Day Before Tomorrow (1999) and the recent work 526, the new video work Yellow Sound produced especially for the Kunsthalle will be on view. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are interested in the seemingly trivial aspects of life, in everyday situations, simple articles of daily use, unthinkingly discarded refuse – the leavings of our consumer society. They also make useless, forgotten things part of our world, cultural signs with abundant meanings and associations. Their works lend the seemingly valueless a new, artistic value. This places them in the artistic tradition of Duchamp and Tatlin, the Dadaists and the action artists, who abolished the boundaries between works of art and articles of consumption and engendered new evaluation categories. Whereas in her early performances, Svetlana Kopystiansky was concerned mainly with the medium of language, Igor Kopystiansky’s objects explore the art system and its underlying structures. The artist couple have been working together since the late 1970s chiefly on media installations. And although these works constitute joint products – from the idea to execution and presentation – the two artists retain their independence. One example is the 1999 slide projection The Day Before Tomorrow, which captures a random street situation in New York City. And even though the scene is one and the same, we are presented with two different ways of looking at it, that of Svetlana and that of Igor. Presented side by side, the minimal deviations become apparent which finally produce an inner unity. This is how their entire oeuvre is to be understood – a play between individuality and complementarity, a division that merges into a whole not only in the eye of the beholder. Selected group exhibitions: La Biennale de Venezia (Aperto), 1889; Sydney Biennial, 1992; Sao Paulo Biennial, 1994; Istanbul Biennial, 1995; Skulpture. Projects in Münster, 1997 (Svetlana Kopystiansky); Johannesburg Biennial, 1997; Lyon Biennial, 1997; First British Biennial, 1999, Documenta11, 2002, Selected solo exhibitions: Martin-Gropius-Bau, DAAD / Berlinische Galerie, 1991; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1994; The Art Institute of Chicago (Svetlana Kopystiansky), 1996; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, 2000; Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2002; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, 2005

Installation view: The Day Before Tomorrow (1999). Exhibition: "Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky,” (Curator Timo Valjakka). ESPOO Museum of Modern Art EMMA, Espoo Finland, 2007.

Installation view: "Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky,” Curator Loretta Yarlow. Fine Arts Center of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. USA. (cat.)

The Day Before Tomorrow reproduced in: Artist, work, Lisson. Lisson Gallery London, England.  "ARTIST WORK LISSON documents the history and legacy of Lisson Gallery over the past 50 years. Under the art direction of famed Dutch designer Irma Boom, the publication features an A-to-Z of every artist who has had a solo exhibition at the gallery. Distributed in North America by Artbook | D.A.P., 2017.