The artist casts skulls, a heart and a book out of coal and anthracite. The foundation holds five of his objects.
Vladimir Anzelm was born in 1962 in Perm. From 1980 to 1985 he studied at the art and graphics faculty of the Kazakh Pedagogical Institute. From 1999 he worked at the Moscow squat Baumanskaya 13, where Vladimir Dubossarsky and Valery Koshlyakov kept studios nearby. He took part in the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. In 2019 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts. He lives and works in Berlin.
His material is recognisable at first glance: coal and anthracite. Anzelm binds coal dust with resin and casts objects that sculpture normally entrusts to stone and bronze. A skull, a heart, a book, the figure of a boy. He chooses anthracite for its density and sheen. The surface catches light almost like polished graphite, yet it stays brittle and leaves marks on the hands.
The material carries its own biography. Coal is fuel, rock, and a symbol of industrial labour and of entire regions built on it. Turned into sculpture, it starts behaving like a noble stone without ceasing to be what it was.
The series Geology of Knowledge (2007) rests on exactly that. Organic matter compressed over millions of years becomes a book, a form for storing knowledge. Together with Alexander Sigutin, Anzelm made the project Guest Workers of the Spirit.
Five works are held in the collection:
- Large Skull, 2013. Coal, resin. 60 × 50 × 40 cm
- Boy and a New Form of Life, 2013. Coal, resin, pyrite. 70 × 50 × 60 cm
- Skull and Bones, 2009. Coal, resin. 45 × 35 cm
- Heart, 2013. Coal, resin. 17 × 20 × 24 cm
- Book, 2007. Coal, resin. 9 × 54 × 34 cm
Works by Alexander Sigutin are in the collection too, so both artists can be looked at side by side.
