The art of Aleksandr Kosteckij

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This is the kind of fantastic art I like a great deal: nebulous landscapes whose vast forms may be some kind of hybrid architecture; implications of the alien and mystical that retain some ambiguity; dreamlike without slipping into post-Surrealist cliché. Monsieur Thombeau at Full Fathom Five (whose excellent eye I have to thank once again) describes the paintings of Aleksandr Kosteckij/Kostetsky (1954–2010) as being “like Gustave Moreau, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst put in a blender and left out in the rain.” I’d place them somewhere between Ernst Fuchs and Bruce Pennington but Moreau’s chimeras are certainly present. You’d think an artist of this calibre with a large body of work would be better known, most of the attention at the moment seems to be on Russian websites. Let’s hope that changes soon.

Update: Thanks to Joe for pointing the way to this dedicated website, something I missed in my haste.

Examples chosen from these sites:
http://vk.com/album-32941665_175452413 (139 images)
http://www.2photo.ru/en/post/18614

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The fantastic art archive
The illustrators archive

5 thoughts on “The art of Aleksandr Kosteckij”

  1. Thank you for the shout-out, John! Yes, there is definitely something Fuchs-like about his images.

    I don’t know how I missed his website or the fact that he has died. I may have been drinking! So thanks to TJZ for that info!

  2. Thanks, Joe, I’ve updated the post with a link. The vagaries of Russian names doesn’t help. “Eck” in Russian and related languages is pronounced “etsk”, and is sometimes written in a more literal form, hence the multiple spellings.

  3. “Eck” in Russian and related languages is pronounced “etsk”, and is sometimes written in a more literal form, hence the multiple spellings.

    That’s a Polish orthography thing, from trying to cram Slavic phonetics into the Latin alphabet. The rules for transliterating from Russian / Cyrillic into our alphabet are not always consistent but they are a better guide to pronounciation.

    An interesting convergence between his work and this recent software side-effect:
    http://boingboing.net/2015/07/07/watch-more-deepdream-obsessio.html#more-402819

  4. Ha, I thought someone might pull me up about that. Yes, I was thinking of Polish pronunciation.

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