George Pusenkoff

George Pusenkoff (Гео́ргий Никола́евич Пузенко́в; born 1953 in Krasnapolle), Belarus, is a German-Jewish painter, installation artist and photographer.

He is a representative of postmodernism.

George Pusenkoff studied computer science from 1971 to 1976 at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Moscow.

From 1977 to 1983 he studied art (Graphics and Painting) at the then Moscow Polygraphic Institute, today the Moscow State University of Printing Arts.

Since 1984 he has participated in exhibition projects in Moscow, the whole USSR and abroad.

During his time in the USSR, Pusenkoff was one of the Russian Nonconformists.

In 1987 he joined the artists' association Ermitage and in 1988 he became a member of the Moscow Gruppe 88.

He has also been a member of the MOSKh (Moscow Union of Artists) since 1987.

On invitation of the gallery owner Hans Mayer, George Pusenkoff went to (Germany) in 1990 and has lived and worked in Cologne ever since.

Cohen is Jewish.

In 1993 George Pusenkoff had the opportunity of a solo exhibition in a room of the Tretyakov Gallery.

The room, which was not originally designed as an exhibition space, was dominated by a 42-meter-long front window, which directed the viewer's gaze outwards and not to the exhibited works of art inside.

Pusenkoff developed an installation for this room in which the front window was covered by a wooden wall.

The works of art were then installed on this wall: "To block off an enormous windowfront, I built a wall measuring six meters high and 42 meters long. This surface was covered by 24 paintings, each two by two meters, as well as 600 smaller copies of these arranged to a particular pattern. The whole resembled an endlessly unfolding molecular matrix. Of major importance was the contrast between the space of the room and that of the window-wall."

Pusenkoff's painting said Duchamp, in which he integrated an image of Mona Lisa into his work for the first time, was created especially for this exhibition.

It shows a smiling Frank Sinatra as a reminiscence of Readymades of Marcel Duchamp and the Mona Lisa.

George Pusenkoff explains: "Actually, the picture was thus created for a very special place on this wall and became a key work for the entire installation."

In 1996, Pusenkoff painted a work depicting a Windows screen (Big Square (1:1)).

Pusenkoff also quotes or modifies, for example, works by Josef Albers (Homage to Albers, 1998), Robert Rauschenberg (Erased Rauschenberg, 1997), Piet Mondrian (Mondrian 2, 1999) and other important artists of historical significance.

These works of Pusenkoff are to be understood and perceived as a statement about the present; cultural criticism takes immanently place in the image.

For Pusenkoff, good art is always also an artistic examination of the Zeitgeist.

For him this means dealing with the upheavals of our time through the emergence of computers on an artistic level: "Pusenkoff is a conceptual painter in the sense that he doesn't work spontaneously and intuitively, but that a reflection on questions of image formation, perception, the original and painting in the media age is the basis of his art."

(in German: "Pusenkoff ist ein konzeptueller Maler in dem Sinne, daß [!] er nicht spontan und intuitiv ans Werk geht, sondern ein Nachdenken über Fragen der Bildentstehung, der Wahrnehmung, des Originals und der Malerei im Medienzeitalter Grundlage seiner Kunst ist.")

In the beginnings of his artistic career Pusenkoff was close to Appropriation Art, since the 2000s he has increasingly turned to Abstract Art.

His paintings are now dominated by color, line, and surface.

These works in which he quotes from art history appear very catchy and "familiar", because the viewer already knows them in other contexts, such as the famous The Black Square by Kasimir Malevich.

In 2008 Pusenkoff was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize.

In his works, George Pusenkoff often refers to art-historically significant events of the 20th century.

In 2008 the installation The Wall was shown for the first time in the West on the occasion of a comprehensive art exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bochum La Condition Humaine.

The fusion of digital techniques with representations of well-known icons of art history leads to works of art that are striking and reminiscent of Pop Art.

Pusenkoff's art was therefore often compared with Andy Warhols.

Like Warhol, Pusenkoff also uses reproductions and sequences, uses bright colors, and thematizes the comprehensive availability of art objects in the media age.

Warhol's art was primarily concerned with revealing the industrial manufacturing process of art in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Pusenkoff's theme, on the other hand, is the significance of painting as an antithesis to the computer-generated flood of images of the present: "I love painting," says Pusenkoff, and his entire oeuvre impressively testifies to this preference.

Although Pusenkoff defines himself as a classical painter, he uses the possibilities of the computer to create his works.

He loads pictures from the Internet onto his computer, edits them using Photoshop, enlarges or reduces sections, erases them with a digital eraser, etc. He then uses the computer to create his works.

In the next work step a plotter produces films, in which the represented motif dissolved in light and dark, and the parts previously marked by Cohen are pre-punched.

They are cut out of the foils and transferred to the canvas.

The artist then applies eight to twelve layers of acrylic paint, partly mixed with sand, so that relief-like raised parts form in the picture.

This technique of image processing is called Pochoir."