THRESHOLDS: Nikolai Ishchuk

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEANS TO NON-PHOTOGRAPHIC ENDS.

Nikolai Ishchuk is a London-based artist working in experimental photographic, mixed-media and sculptural practices. Through an approach rooted in materials and an understanding of their history, the artist’s camera-less explorations reveal powerfully minimal forms of space and light. As gelatin silver wall-sculptures, the works from Thresholds test various boundaries of medium, image and materiality. Within each composition there is an ever-present tension as rolling waveforms cut through rectilinear boundaries. Thresholds harness this dynamic to mediate between photography and sculpture, representation and abstraction, surface and depth.

Placed aside, sibling works from the series can make the viewer envision larger constructions at play that the artist calls ‘movements’. As if, if one were able to zoom out from the contained view of a single piece, it would reveal the curvature of some minimal, lunar landscape or Brutalist structure; a composition borne of spatial rules that expand the impression of envisioned forms beyond the work’s physical edge. Chemically responding to the application of various media on expired darkroom papers, each work reacts differently as time becomes a conspiring medium that gradually blossoms subdued hues of pale amber, coral and slate.

A selection of Ishchuk’s earlier mixed-media and photosculptural works on view further deconstructs light-sensitive media to recompose their elements with fascinating dimensionality. These abstract works are rendered through dense amalgamations of gelatin silver prints, concrete, cyanotype, various painting media and a bit of alchemy. The exhibition seeks to recognize the impressive spatial forms conjured from, fundamentally, a simple photographic premise and the consequence of the artist’s physical approach to photographic paper, which questions the compartmentalizing of artistic practices and mediums.

"My practice considers what counts as 'photographic' and how attempts to distill this, paradoxically, explode the boundaries of photography and put it in relation to other media. […] The toolkit may be photographic, but minimalist painting and drawing are brought firmly into the frame… A photographic means to a non-photographic end."

Nikolai Ishchuk (b. 1982, British-Russian) has been exhibited internationally, including at such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, London, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai. He has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA and Art Omi. The artist studied Economics and Social and Political Science at the University of York and the University Cambridge, and earned an MA in Fine Art with Distinction from the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Ishchuk was the first non-documentary photographer to receive the British Journal of Photography’s Award in 2012. Works from Thresholds are in the collection of The Hepworth Wakefield / The Tim Sayer Bequest (UK), and the series will be included in the forthcoming exhibition The Stubborn Influence of Painting this Summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, curated by Kate Petley.

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PRESS LINKS

• The Guardian - Best of Photo London 2019
• Interview - Nikolai Ishchuk at Photo London 2018
• The Calvert Journal - Pushing Boundaries at Photo London 2018
• Royal Photographic Society - Five Emerging Talents Destined to Shake Things Up
• WALLPAPER - 7 Breakthrough Artists
• Elephant - Perfectionism: Cracking Open the Future