Sergey Dozhd creates paintings, installations and performances that combine multi-layered geometric designs, figurative elements, and amorphous forms under an approach he terms “Psy Art”. Dozhd is concerned with accessing the flow of the inner mind to construct an innovative visual language that he places within the dialectics of artistic theory relating to the legacy of Malevich and the Suprematist movement. He defines his theory as; “a direction in art-making that works with processes of multiple abstractions and rendering to create a new artistic reality”. The artist continues, “The term “Psy” is a term indicating the possibility that a person has the kind of inner processes conducive to creating art” and “the means to create a new reality within art derived from the totality of our inner psychological processes”. What Dozhd’s attempts to harness are the workings of the emotional and subconscious self as guides to art-making. Formally, Dozhd takes basic abstraction as the creative starting point for his work, which he then refines in a process of ever greater visual detachment from the original subject in order to search for a new vocabulary. Dozhd sees this as a continuation of themes consistent with the abstract
avant garde of the early twentieth century.
In an almost shamanistic manner – which brings together seemingly mathematical arrangements and notions of the mystical – Dohzd’s investigations utilize evermore multi-layered abstractions which he terms “over-abstraction”. These; “create a new complex and completely subjective form, or “overform”. This theoretical approach is further evolved through what Dohzd terms “meta-abstractions” and “meta-reality” which indicate specific stages within the evolution of his work.

Dozhd’s ideas are commonly manifest in his paintings through the building of geometric layers

including circular, triangular and cuboid motifs to construct imagery that evokes the
cosmological and transcendental. “Dark Abstract Cross”, 2012 exemplifies these conceptual
underpinnings and is a superlative example of his recurring aesthetic tendencies. On a black
background a fragmented series of crimson triangular shards and planes converge within the inky
blackness in a cross-like design. Multiple viewpoints show the cross rotated at different angles
and seemingly either fragmenting or coalescing; moving in to occupy the frame or receding from
it. It is this ambiguity of form and position that opens the work to interpretation while placing it
within the lineage, as Dozhd puts it, of the “abstraction of Kazimir Malevich, the romantic
abstraction of Kandinsky, the seminal abstract and philosophical paintings of Pablo Picasso and
the quasi-abstract works of Mark Rothko”. In fact it is Dozhd’s aim to discover what lies beyond
“this threshold of the unknown” that he considers the aforementioned artists brought us to, and
that he believes, has not been fully explored since their time.
In his lithographs and drawings organic and biological forms are present, often with figurative
elements such as human faces emerging from background nebulas, wing-like formations,
fantastic creatures, or skeletal structures. These cornucopias directly refer to Dozhd’s quest to
reach and articulate a kind of primeval or intuitive knowledge. Dozhd’s work excavates the
workings and imaginings of our deeper selves; the unconscious flow of our “inner-ness” and
transforms that cognitive power into a constantly expanding visual lexicon.

Curators: Margo Grant, Daria Gradusova