All the films, including the circular panoramas, begin and end with the titles. The first titles are the title of the film, capturing the attention of the viewer, settling in his memory, providing commentary about the film, a synopsis. Dmitri Gutov writes phrases in white paint on a black background. This graphic design, in the spirit of the titles in the days when the Circular Kinopanorama flourished, helps the viewer, watching Gutov’s phrases, to familiarise himself with the ascetic composure of aphoristic zen calligraphy. The white phrases on a black background demand serious attention just like instructive chalk writings on a school’s black chalkboard. One wants to believe that they will also summarise the plots of the fragments of endlessly engrossing films that have not been shot or have been lost, just like the laconic, black-and-white captions of a silent film.

Dmitry Gutov was born in 1960 in Moscow. In 1978-1980, he studied psychology at the Moscow State Pedagogical University. He studied in parallel academic drawing under Mikhail Kukunov at the Faculty of General Education. In 1985, he graduated from the Public Correspondence University of the Arts (ZNUI, Faculty of Easel Painting, the studio of Nikolay Kasatkin). In 1992 he graduated from the Department of History and Theory of Visual Arts of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (Saint Petersburg). He began exhibiting his works in 1988. He has participated in more than 30 solo and 150 group exhibitions all over the world. They include the Venice Biennale (1995, 2007, 2011), the Istanbul Biennale (1992), Manifest (1996) in Rotterdam, the San Paolo Biennale in 2002, the Sydney Biennale (2006), documenta (2007), the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2007) in Japan, the Shanghai Biennale (2012), etc. In 1994, he organised Moscow’s Lifshitz Institute. He lives and works in Moscow.

http://www.gutov.ru