"Shouldn't be gone!"
Photo: Roman März
Anna Bogouchevskaia is a German-Russian sculptor who comes from Moscow and has lived in Berlin since 1994. Under the appellative title "Shouldn't be gone (It should not disappear)" she shows new works, most of which she modeled between 2019 and 2021 and which were cast in 2022/23. They are sculptures made in aluminum, nickel silver and bronze. Bogouchevskaia's works of recent years are united by a moment of the fluid, the flowing, and the ephemeral.
Her visual repertoire is oriented towards the plastic representation of water (in various states of aggregation, to that extent also fog and snow), as well as plants and animals. In Bogouchevskaia's material artistic approach, the state of permanent variability of flowing water, how could it be otherwise, is stilled (as in the sculpture "Waterfall"), a natural movement image of boundlessness is frozen. But this from the understanding that the flow of water is dynamic, which provokes the classic question of how this dynamic could be captured sculpturally.
Bogouchevskaia has found for it cloudy cotton-wool-like, sometimes surreal formal expressions against the efficiency-influenced world. These forms were not insignificantly influenced by filmic images from the French documentary film "Microcosmos. Le peuple de l'herbe" (in German: "Mikrokosmos. Das Volk der Gräser") from 1996. As impressive as the film is, Anna Bogouchevskaia's sculptures are unmistakable, transferring the manifold forms of water into a poetic cycle of aesthetic substance consolidation. It is a suggestive game that touches on fundamental questions of sculpture as well as of human interaction with natural resources.
The artist thus occupies a formally experimental terrain in the transition between figuration and abstraction, capable of sending out tactile as well as time-critical impulses. This artist celebrates the magnificence of water in narrative opulence while reminding us of the transience of all nature. Bogouchevskaya's formal conception of the combinatorial is striking. With a twinkle in her eye, she brings together different sculptural positions and the still virulent spirit of Post-Impressionism in a balanced weighting.