Draft:Igor Kopystiansky

Igor Kopystiansky (born December 16, 1954 in Lviv) is an American artist, active in New York City since 1988. He has a multimedia practice, including painting, photography, film, and video, with an investigation of language as her primary paradigm. On works in media of film and video, he collaborates with his wife Svetlana Kopystiansky. His independent works and their joint works are shown internationally and held in museum and private collections around the world. Archives by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are located at the Centre Pompidou, Kandinsky Library.

Biography
Kopystiansky was born 16 December 1954 in Lviv, Ukraine, and from late Seventies until late Eighties was part of "Soviet non-conformist artists" w. In 1975, Igor Kopystiansky turned to the avant-garde tradition. His ‘'Pictorial Studies'' (1975) commented on the work of Malevich. The initial inspiration for his works rooted in ideas of deconstruction and appropriation came from DADA and Marcel Duchamp. These works appropriated images by Western European painters. The new paintings were deliberately created in different sizes compared to the originals. This approach reflects the situation where a work of art functions in society more as a reproduction in a book, poster, or billboard, or when it is viewed on a screen at the cinema, with the size of the image being different from the original painting. The execution of the appropriated paintings was just the first stage in the production of the actual artwork. These painted copies were then used to create assemblages or environments referred to as ‘Interiors’, where images from various paintings interacted with one another. The final outcome of the entire work would always be revealed only at the last stage, upon completing the installation, remaining absolutely unpredictable beforehand. Igor Kopystiansky’ individual works produced in the media of painting and installation since the early eighties have rightfully been defined as a part of an international art movement known as Appropriation Art (as noted by Robert Atkins in Art Speak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, Abbeville Publishers, New York, 1990, pp. 42–43.)”

In 1988, he and his wife and collaborator Svetlana Kopystiansky left the Soviet Union and moved to New York City, which has been their home base since then. In 1990 in New York Igor started a new series of large scale installations based at ideas of appropriation. In 1990, Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky received a DAAD artists-in-residency grant that brought them to Berlin, Germany, and resulted in their first solo museum exhibition with a catalogue, "In the Tradition," curated by René Block for the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, in the Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 1991.

In the 1990s, his individual and joint practice expanded and the work was shown in major international presentations, including the 1988 1992 Sydney Biennial,1992 Sydney Biennial, the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial, 1997's Lyon Biennial, 1999's Liverpool Biennial, and documenta 11 in 2002, and collected by museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art  in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Musée National d'Art Moderne Center Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France; Tate Modern, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia; Folkwang Museum in Essen; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen; Berlinische Galerie; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; MUMOK Vienna, Austria; Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; Frac Corsica, France; MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Poland; Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Poland.

Increasingly the Kopystianskys make video. Their 1996-7 video Incidents, filmed on streets of Chelsea Manhattan was first shown by curator Harald Szeemann in the Lyon Biennale in 1997, meditates on the potential beauty and pathos of discarded objects, as they are balletically blown around by wind along a city street. Later collaborations, such as 2005's Yellow Sound harks back to Svetlana's citations, within her 1980s paintings, of modernist masters. Yellow Sound takes its title from a Wassily Kandinsky theater production, and its silent structure and running time from John Cage's famous composition 4'33" (1952), in which a piano player sits at the keyboard, lift the lid and stay motionless and silent for the next four minutes and thirty-three seconds. A 2006 film installation, Pink & White-A Play in Two Time Directions, features eight projections showing black-and-white found footage, emphasizing their interest in early cinema, and the surrealist graphic intensity of photographer Man Ray. Lisson Gallery in London represented them from 2001 to 2011.

Honors and awards
In 2008 he received a Residences Internationales aux Recollets in Paris, France.

Publications

 * "Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky". The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. 2023. Foreword: Arūnas Gelūnas. Texts by Michel Gauthier, John G. Hahnhardt. Quotations from texts about Kopystiansky’s by Kai-Uwe Hemken, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anthony Spira, Adam D. Weinberg.(Lithuanian, English, French) ISBN 9786094261824
 * ‘'Kopystiansky: Double Fiction/Fiction Double”. Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Musée d"Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne. 2010. Texts by John G. Hanhardt, Philippe-Alain Michaud. Les Presses du Réel. ISBN 9782840663744
 * "Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky." Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki, 2007. Texts by Timo Valjakka, Anthony Spira, Barry Schwabsky, (English, Finnish, Swedish), EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki. ISBN 9789525509007
 * “Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: The Day before Tomorrow”. Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel and Fine Arts Centre of UMass, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005. With introduction by René Block and Loretta Yarlow and texts by Adam D. Weinberg, Barry Schwabsky, Andreas Bee, Anthony Bond, Kai-Uwe Hemken. (English and German), ISBN 9780929597195
 * “Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: Tracking Shot.” With texts by Barry Schwabsky, Andreas Bee, Anthony Bond. (English and Spanish), Distrito4, 2004. Madrid, Spain ISBN 9788493342265
 * “Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: Dialog,” Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the IFA Galerie Berlin, 1998. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Stuttgart/Berlin.
 * “Svetlana Kopystiansky: Workers Library.” 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, 1997. ISBN 9783927869127
 * “Igor Kopystiansky: The Museum.” Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany. 1994.
 * “Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky” Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, 1991. DAAD. Curator René Block. Texts by Dan Cameron, Joachim Sartorius, Christine Tacke. ISBN 9783893570317