Anderson Gallery
Bridgewater State University
40 School Street
Bridgewater, MA
November 1 through February 18, 2025
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Sergei Isupov presents Ancestor, a dramatic solo exhibition featuring masterworks of figural sculpture at Anderson Gallery at Bridgewater State University. The installation creates a dialog between Isupov’s large busts and figural sculptures along with a web of narratives woven through the work’s illustrated surfaces.
Invited by Jay Block, associate director of collections and exhibitions at Bridgewater, Isupov embraced the opportunity to be an artist-curator and fill Anderson Gallery with selected works from 2008 to the present. A brilliant colorist, Sergei elected to paint the walls a deep red-orange, offsetting and highlighting the fully illustrated ceramic sculptures. Isupov’s large-scale busts from his Androgyny series and hybrid figures from his Humanimals series are placed in engaging dialogs with one another, inviting viewers to reflect on the ancestral narratives within the works and through their own family history.
“Sergei Isupov’s solo exhibition explores ancestral memories that are packed within narratives drawn from traditional myths, tales and legends. The stories are veiled, cautionary warnings of those mysterious things that go bump in the night, deeply woven and textural, fascinating in appearance and bristling sharp in meaning.” – Jay Block
Isupov’s Ancestor unites a collection of figural sculpture that shows the evolution of ideas in his work. As expressed in the characters he portrays, the sculptures’ interacting eyes and gestures activate relationships that are universal and timeless. Installed in a zig zag, this exhibition explores narratives from his past in dialog with the present, bridging memory and place in choreographed alignments.
“Regardless of our backgrounds or wherever in the world we came to be, our shared experiences as humans are interwoven and passed on from generation to generation. The exhibition ANCESTOR allowed me to reflect on these works and my sources of inspiration and motivation … When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them, perhaps they create me.” – Sergei Isupov
Born into a family of Russian artists during the USSR, Isupov spent his childhood in Kyiv, Ukraine, educated in Tallinn, Estonia, and now lives and works in Western Massachusetts.
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.
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
