ART-PRESENTATION: Stefan Tcherepnin-The Mad Masters

Stefan Tcherepnin’s visual artistic practice is shaped by his background in music composition and performance. Tcherepnin’s approach is collaborative, drawing on the artist’s professional network of artist and musician friends. Their collaborative performances often take place within Tcherepnin’s installations. His first solo Museum exhibition is on presentation at the Stedelijk Museum.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

Stefan Tcherepnin is an artist whose work employs immersive staged environments. Of prime importance to the artist’s practice is the viewer’s felt experience, challenging the conceptual mandate of contemporary art. This emphasis informs “The Mad Masters” which occupies a large gallery in the museum’s ground floor. The exhibition follows moments as experienced by four enormous sculptural creatures, as they move within the orbit of a dramatic centerpiece suspended from the ceiling: a glass clown face. The monsters’ journeys are depicted on a video projected onto the gallery wall. The stuffed furry creatures are a recurring element in Tcherepnin’s performances, videos and sculptures. In “The Mad Masters”, the endearing monsters are trapped in a miniature world, as if on display in a diorama of a natural history museum. The central glass object is inspired by the head in George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park gate, an amusement park on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where Tcherepnin lives. Hovering like a clairvoyant amulet, the kaleidoscopic lens contains fragments of potential pasts and futures. The glass displays a hypothetical map of a future USA, the borders of its US territories eroded by climate change. And superimposed are details of the Kazimir Malevich Suprematist composition “Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions” (1915), which belongs to the Stedelijk collection. A video projected onto the gallery wall chronicles the monsters’ journeys through the four seasons. Like a musical composition, the individual elements work in synchrony, merging to create a total experience that transcends the boundaries of language. The artist composed the music for The Mad Masters video with musician Lewis Wallace Blanchard III, with whom he forms the musical duo Existential Blowfish.

Info: Curator: Karen Archey, Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 27/1-3/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl