דמיר מורטוב הוא המוביל הבלתי מעורער של הפופ-ארט הסיבירי. הוא מתגורר ועובד בעיר אומסק – שלוש שעות טיסה ממוסקבה, אליה מזדמן לו להגיע רק פעם בכמה שנים. אך, בהיותו רחוק גיאוגרפית ממרכזי תרבות בינלאומיים, דמיר איננו מתייאש, אלא משתמש בייחוד המקומי כאחד המרכיבים ביצירתו.
הייתי מכנה את עבודותיו של דמיר “פופ-ארט בריבוע”. כך למשל, דמיר לוקח כבסיס את הקלסיקה של הפופ-ארט האמריקאי – הדגל של ג’ספר ג’ונס – והופך אותו ל”ארצות המאוחדות של סיביר”. למעט קלסיקה אמריקאית, לאמן מקורות השראה רבים אחרים – קלישאות אמנותיות, קיטצ’ מקומי, אמנות קלסית של המזרח וכו’ וכו’. לדברי דמיר עצמו, הוא אוהד להביא נושא לקיצוניות, לאבסורד ואף פארסה ברורה. המוטו שלו: “כשמצפים לך משמאל – תופיע מימין!”.
דמיר – אמן רב גוני: צייר, גרפיקאי, פסל, מעצב במה בתיאטרון. לעניות דעתי, העבודות הכי ייחודיות ומרתקות שלו הן אלה שעשויות מחומרי הבלאי: מארגזי קרטון, שקיות נייר, תקליטים ישנים, קלטות וידאו, צעצועים, חפיסות סיגריות. את ביתו הפרטי דמיר גם הפך לסוג של יצירת אמנות, “מהודרת בכל טוב”.
בשנת 1995 דמיר מורטוב הקים, באזור התעשייה של אומסק, את הגלריה “קוצ’ום”. לדבריו, זהו סוג של מועדון שיתופי, עם פעילות אמנותית משלו, מיצגים, פרויקטים שמתארחים באתרים אחרים ותערוכות.

לאוניד זייגר

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מידע ביוגרפי קצר:
נולד בשנת 1967 בעיר טובולסק. סיים את הפקולטה לאמנות גרפית באוניברסיטה הממלכתית למקצועות ההוראה בעיר אומסק. משתתף בתערוכות מאז שנת 1988. עבודותיו נמצאות באוספים פרטים ומוזיאליים ברחבי סיביר ובמוסקבה

Leonid Lerner, text for catalogue

Damir’s workshop is a cabinet of curiosities. Original and unique, it’s not a cabinet of European scholastic, where everything is gray, metallic, and shiny, with many glazed shelves, folders and cranny with neglected artifacts. Damir’s cabinet is Oriental couch, with a spicy dust all inside out, the home of an extrovert (although I’m not sure that Damir is such a complete extrovert, he certainly has his corked bottles and secret little albums). Cabinet of a generous master, confident (but doubting, perhaps even vulnerable), showing to himself and his visitors the results of ongoing experiments.
If you succumb to the temptation of a cataloger and to build fragments of Damir’s research in a series or string of discoveries and revelations, you’ll get an interesting line, provoking predictions, a guessing game – what’s the next step, turn, will the artist come, after all, to the geometric abstraction or completely dissolve in the web-art?
My personal acquaintance with Damir happened around 2000, maybe a little earlier. Unforgettable Sveta Kogan took me to some show where I discovered “Pillow Fight” and “Cook’s Shaolin” – things exceptionally cute and just as much important to Damir. Then I was in his studio, where I saw the artist, as well as the works in progress, and was finally confirmed in the opinion that in front of me was a very interesting artist and a wonderful character. On the same (or next) day I examined mid-nineties canvases and corrugated cardboard “Omsk … I Did Time Here … ” at the Art of Omsk Museum, and found that Damir belongs to the category of artists who can easily change the style of painting and the” ideological” line, the philosophy of their art. This guess was confirmed later more than once.
Damir’s daily exercises in art form from the deep cleavage, delamination of shape. Even referring to his most well-known today “ideological” works “Che Burashka,” “Mickey Mao,” “West Is Dead,” Damir can be reckoned to innate formalists (work on numerous Ches has a particular formalism). And in the works of the early and mid-2000s much attention of the artist is given to the texture (“Afrussia,” which is always in front of my eyes, is very revealing in this sense.) The search of form(s) and texture creation eventually led Damir to a radically different art of the last three or four years, when he again made a sudden step to the side, refusing his recognizable style.
Works and even more method that gave him a reputation as perhaps the most relevant of the Siberian artists (of course, we do not take into account the capital quasi Siberians), Damir preferred to call pop art. He probably just liked the concept, as well as belonging to the style, a certain way of creative work, personified by extremely likable to him Andy Warhol. Endless quotes, his own quotes, animation, recognizable images, playing with “ideologies,” creation of some new myths and fakes everything crystallized into a clear program of art, art-system. And any image being placed in this “solution-formalizator” – from Thumbelina to Chingachgook to Chernyshevsky and Pushkin was instantly assimilated by Damir’s history, which had the potential to become infinite as his myth gained the ability to absorb any image. This form and image producing biomass could eventually lead the artist to the factory (in all senses) and the big money. But Damir stopped, preferring Chinese consumer goods to Swiss watches.
And this choice seems to me quite natural. The artist moved to another level. And, following the logic of the art game (or rather, a game called Art), he began again from the beginning with a study of the forms, the simplest, uncomplicated, from touching of new surfaces, scrutinizing previously unknown (or uninteresting) texture. Old characters, an integral part Damir’s life and philosophy of life, of course, slip into a picturesque reality, but that’s a whole different reality. After the bright, lush “pop art” recent “art-brut” sometimes looks cloudy and poor, but in it, if you look and listen, there is the same voltage on the background of a new crunching and grinding. Damir stirs, softens their shapes and images, throws them out and …observes the process of crystallization.
It may seem that Damir opens evident truths, illustrates his own studies of art history, and that collection of his works is just an abstract from which the text was deleted, but the pictures were left. In fact, it seems to me, Damir not so much studies some history books (of course, this also) as writes this history for himself, stays inside it, as inside the maze, where there is no linearity, predictability, but rather, solid crannies, pockets and stone cells, where he sometimes stays for long, highlights some interesting ephemerality, captures it all in the format of travel notes. Yes, Damir’s art, in fact, is the travel notes of the alchemist of arts.

Leonid Lerner, editor and publisher, “The Art Magazine “, Moscow 2010.