Five years after a retrospective exhibition of Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (in 2003), the Fotomuseum Winterthur now presents another Russian-Ukrainian artist of the next generation: Sergey Bratkov (born 1960). The exhibition includes some 130 works documenting Bratkov's photographic oeuvre since 1990. Socially critical, politically motivated, his photographs are a frank portrayal of everyday life since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bratkov, who was born in the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkov, lays bare the obsolete ideological clichés of the Soviet era and the newfound muscle-flexing capitalist drive of the east in scenes that occasionally evoke a strident theatre of the new reality. According to curator Thomas Seelig, Bratkov's documentary portraits of secretaries, soldiers, former seamen, steelworkers, homeless children, labourers, prostitutes, soldiers and women who want to start a family invent a new form of Socialist Realism in his photographs, unmasking critical socialism as fictitious and ideologically defunct. In his portraits the protagonists transcend their commonplace.
Fotomuseum Winterthur Web Site
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