In the exhibition “A suprematist study of the ancient greek myths”, Pavel Pepperstein depicts lively episodes and figures from Greek mythology alongside and, often, in physical engagement with, the signs, symbols, and geometric forms commonly associated with the Suprematist movement. Reflecting his membership in a young generation of Russian conceptual artists, a group formed in equal parts by the socio-cultural pressures of the late Soviet Union and a desire to move past the abstract artistic solutions it engendered, Pepperstein creates works which both conceptualize narrative situations and insert abstract forms into a narratable realm.

The apparent playfulness of his drawings belies their critical engagement with the Russian artistic tradition. The frivolity of many of the scenes he depicts create an ironic and powerful distance from both the solemnity of Icon painting and the political import of Russian Futurism and its subsequent movements. Familiar cultural motifs in his drawing produce visionary. The excitement and freshness of Pepperstein’s visual collisions of episodes from ancient Greek mythology with these alien artistic traditions enriches this series with a vibrant historicity.

Mythologia, the Greek word from which we derive ‚myth’, is made up of two separate roots, mythoi, or stories, and legein, to speak or tell. Thus, a study of myths, such as Pepperstein’s series presents to us, would be an investigation of both the stories and their telling. The traditional presentation of the ancient Greek myths as important fossils of a civilization dealing with its mortality is upended in Pepperstein’s work, for, when confronted with abstract forms which are both theoretically atemporal and, because of their art historical relevance, visually referential, the Greek myths appear in all their absurd glory as fantastic, artificial creations.

These abstract forms are often well known, such as with “The Fight between the Gods and the Centaur”, in which for example Malevich’s Black Square and other geometric forms battle it out with a half-horse, half-man creature. The fact that the art historical references are often easily recognizable highlights the discourse present in these works between artistic styles, conceptual movements, and civilizations as manifested by their visualizations of the sublime and the commonplace. With a knowing wink towards their popularity, and the artistic fluency necessary to elide their disparate modes of representation, Pepperstein creates his playful critique, in pen and ink, of the historical-cultural inheritance of the West.