ARTWORK & INSTALLATIONS
FIGURATIVE SERIES
HUMANIMALS
LARGE WORKS & INSTALLATIONS
- Sergei Isupov “Fire Sculpture”. Produced for TurnPark’s Summer Festival: “Healing Flames”. Firing & Event, June 11, 2022 at TurnPark Art Space (West Stockbridge, MA). Photo by Leslie Ferrin.
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SERGEI ISUPOV

Sergei Isupov Artist Portrait, 2021, Photo Credit: John Polak
ABOUT
Estonian-American, b. 1963 Stavropole, USSR,
lives and works between Cummington, MA, USA and Tallinn, Estonia
Sergei Isupov is an Estonian-American sculptor internationally known for his highly detailed, narrative works. Isupov explores painterly figure-ground relationships, creating surreal sculptures with a complex artistic vocabulary that combines two- and three-dimensional narratives and animal/human hybrids. He works in ceramics using traditional hand-building and sculpting techniques to combine surface and form with narrative painting using colored stains highlighted with clear glaze.
Isupov has a long international resume with work included in numerous collections and exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Australia, Museum Angewandte in Kunst, Germany, and in the US at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum of Fine Arts–Boston, Museum of Fine Arts–Houston, Mint Museum of Art, and Racine Art Museum. In 2017, his solo exhibition at The Erie Art Museum presented selected works in a 20-year career survey titled Hidden Messages, followed by Surreal Promenade e, another survey solo in 2019 at the Russian Museum of Art in Minnesota.
ON HIS WORK
Often called an erotic Surrealist for his daring representations of sexuality, relationships, and human encounter, Isupov takes narrative subject matter and merges it with ceramic sculptural form. Drawing on personal experience, and human observation, he creates works that integrate autobiography with universal narrative.
He states, “Everything that surrounds and excites me is automatically processed and transformed into…an artwork. […] The essence of my work is not in the medium or the creative process, but in the human beings and their incredible diversity. When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them, perhaps they create me.”
While the robust, and racially distinct facial traits make each sculpture unique, they also make the body of work capable of representing universal experiences. The bold color palette, heavily tattooed faces, and textured surfaces relate these works to the aesthetics of traditional Russian art, as well as to contemporary styles of illustration.
“My work portrays characters placed in situations that are drawn from my imagination but based on my life experiences. My art works capture a composite of fleeting moments, hand gestures, eye movements that follow and reveal the sentiments expressed. These details are all derived from actual observations but are gathered or collected over my lifetime. Through the drawn images and sculpted forms, I capture faces, body types and use symbolic elements to compose, in the same way as you might create a collage. These ideas drift and migrate throughout my work without direct regard to specific individuals, chronology or geography. Universalism is implied and personal interpretation expected. Through my work I get to report about and explore human encounters, comment on the relationships between man and woman, and eventually their sexual union that leads to the final outcome – the passing on of DNA which is the ultimate collection – a combined set of genes and a new life, represented in the child.”
CURRENT + RECENT EXHIBITIONS
FEATURED & PAST EXHIBITIONS
PAST & PRESENT
2022 Solo Exhibition | Ferrin Contemporary | North Adams, MA
ARE WE THERE YET?
Ferrin Contemporary | North Adams, MA
July 15 – September 2, 2023
FIGURING SPACE | The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA
The Clay Studio | Philadelphia, PA
January 12, 2023 – April 16, 2023
Our America/Whose America?
Ferrin Contemporary | North Adams, MA
August 6 – October 30, 2022
Sergei Isupov: PAST & PRESENT
Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA
May 7 – July 9, 2022
- Sergei Isupov: PROXIMAL DUALITY
- 2022 INTERNATIONAL CERAMIC ART FAIR (ICAF)
- HEY! LE DESSIN
- ART MACAO: Macao International Art Biennale 2021
- ABOUT FACE: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture
- COOL CLAY: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Ceramics | Crocker Art Museum
- COMPOSING FORM | Helen Day Art Center
- SURREAL PROMENADE: Sergei Isupov at Russian Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN
- DIRECTIONS: Sergei Isupov
- ALICE IN WONDERLAND
- SERGEI ISUPOV: Selections from Hidden Messages
- SERGEI ISUPOV: The Rising
- RE—Reanimate, Repair, Mend and Meld
- MENDED WAYS | The Art of Inventive Repair
- SERGEI ISUPOV: Head On
- SERGEI ISUPOV at Kasher | Potamkin
- NCECA 2015 Conference: “Lively Experiments”
- EVERYTHING IS ALL WHITE: The New Year Show
- A CLAY BESTIARY
- PROMENADE: New Work by Sergei Isupov
- HERE AND THERE
- JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER 40th ANNIVERSARY
- RAM COLLECTION FOCUS: Sergei Isupov
- SERGEI ISUPOV: Call of the Wild
- INCITEFUL CLAY
- BODY & SOUL
- CLAY BODIES: A Group Exhibition of Figural Ceramic Sculpture
- ANIMAL STORIES
- EXPOSED: Heads, Busts & Nudes
- SERGEI ISUPOV: Hidden Messages
WORKSHOPS
We are pleased to be launching a new series of digital workshops
through Project Art 01026.com, with Sergei Isupov.
Workshop dates and more information can be found on
NEWS & FEATURES
Ferrin Contemporary Presents | SERGEI ISUPOV | The Road to Cummington at Project Art
ARE WE THERE YET? Featured in the Berkshire Eagle
Sergei Isupov on Tales of a Red Clay Rambler
Sergei Isupov and family featured in The World
The Clay Studio Presents: Clay & Conversations Online Lectures with Cristina Córdova & Sergei Isupov
Sergei Isupov Interview Featured in the JRA Quarterly Winter 2023
NEW YEAR’S WORKSHOP AT THE CLAY STUDIO: Facial Features with Sergei Isupov
OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA? Featured in the Berkshire Eagle
Making History: Recent Acquisitions from the Permanent Collection
Sergei Isupov’s Fire Sculpture & TurnPark Summer Event Featured in the Berkshire Eagle
Sergei Isupov: PAST & PRESENT Featured in the Berkshire Eagle
‘Composing Form’ in Stowe Today, July 18, 2019
PUBLICATIONS
Ferrin Contemporary is proud to present new works from internationally renowned sculptor Sergei Isupov. Sergei Isupov: PAST & PRESENT features new ceramic sculptures presented with both a multi-dimensional, mixed-media wall installation and independent pedestal-based works. Isupov and Ferrin Contemporary have been working together and presenting exhibitions internationally since 1996 and this will be the artist’s third solo show in our North Adams gallery location.
- Catalog release: November 1, 2022.
- 26-page, full-color catalog
- Installation Images & Artwork Highlights
- Exhibition Release, Show Statements, & Artist Bio-CV
AVAILABLE FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Inquire to Purchase
Chain | 1999 | Porcelain Sculpture | 10.5 x 13.5 x 9″
.Complacency | 1998 | Porcelain Sculpture | 11 x 18 x 6.5″
Complementary | Print & Sculpture | 2000
Voice from Inside | 1997 | Porcelain Sculpture | 8 x 6 x 4″
INQUIRE
Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.
If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message
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