evgeny yufit

New Morning, Longevity, Vigilant, The Cooling Witness, The Transparent Grove
1991-1996
Black and white photographs

The artistic work of Evgeny Yufit, the leader of Necrorealism, was from the very outset connected to film. The photographs presented at the exhibition are film frames, parts of a film narrative, which develops beyond our field of vision. The subject of death will always remain at the centre of his art, more specifically the gradual death of mankind, of the system, of an ideological construct, which does not become inert, does not fully disappear, but continues the strange existence of the “undead,” as the artist calls them. Yufit is intoxicated with the necrotic decomposition of the utopic models of the world and man, of the very ideology, compromising the idea of creation and constructive action, breaking up all the main functions of the Soviet system.

Evgeny Yufit was born in 1960 in Saint Petersburg. He is an artist, photographer and film director. He was one of the founders of Soviet Parallel Cinema. In 1987-1988 he completed an internship at the Lenfilm film studio at Alexander Sokurov’s film school. In 1991 he shot his debut feature length film Dad, Grandfather Frost Has Died at Lenfilm studios. It won the Grand Prix at the Rimini Film Festival (Italy). In subsequent years he has worked at the CТВ and Nikola-Film studios. Yufit’s paintings, photographs and film retrospectives have been exhibited at leading international modern art museums and film festivals. In 2005 he was selected by Rotterdam Film Festival as the director in focus, where he presented a special programme of his films and an exhibition of his photographic works. Yufit’s works can be found in public and private collections in Russia and abroad, including the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Netherlands Film Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. He lives and works in Saint Petersburg and Peterhof. 

http://www.yufit.narod.ru