Anna Bogouchevskaia: Definitely not a waterfall

The string music that is currently playing in part of the exhibition rooms at the Kunsthalle Rostock sounds dramatic. It was composed by Bruno Coulais, who was nominated for an Oscar for his song “Vois Sur Ton Chemin” in the film “The Children of Monsieur Mathieu” (2003). The sounds audible here, however, come from the nature documentary “Microcosm – The People of Grasses” from 1996. Projected onto a wall, it shows insect life in a meadow in France up close. For example, we can watch ants transport beechnuts or dung beetles roll their dung balls.

The 57-year-old Russian sculptor Anna Bogouchevskaia, to whom the Kunsthalle Rostock is dedicating its first retrospective, was inspired by the film for some of her works. That becomes clear – perhaps to clear – if you look around the room: On the wall next to the projection there are reliefs, each showing a stag beetle, a grasshopper and a lizard against a bronze background. And not far from there are a variety of plant sculptures, also mostly quite naturalistic. Would these also look good in the living room at home? If you have a penchant for rustic natural decoration, this will definitely appeal to you Similar on Etsy find.

The aesthetics of an adjacent room, which the music also bathes in pathos, is a little less suitable for everyday use. Only two colors can be seen here: the gray of the walls and floor and glistening silver in the middle, divided into square areas that are mounted on plinths about waist high. Each square shows a part of a water surface on which drops hit or jump out and have taken on very different shapes. Bogouchevskaia has zoomed in on and frozen processes that are otherwise difficult to observe due to their volatility and the size of the drops. And when viewed up close, shapes rich in associations reveal themselves: They could also be mushrooms or flower stalks with symmetrical crowns that grow from the silver surface; a structure resembles a human figure with a round head and a conical hat.

Even more impressive than the square silver surfaces with their drops are the works from Bogouchevskaia’s most recent creative period. They are also mostly made of silver, but are a little more stubborn; sometimes their surfaces are rougher and therefore less reflective. These are replicas of real waterfalls, but the metal material, the changed scale and the cessation of movement make them extremely strange. A sword made of balls stretches vertically into the air, hands seem to stretch out of cascades, a construct could also represent a kind of adventurously built telescope made of candle wax. Does something flow from top to bottom or from bottom to top? A dialectic can be assumed behind the exhibition title “Fallen Falls”.

In view of these fascinating objects, which, if you knew nothing about them, would defy any simple interpretation, the text that accompanies them seems somewhat flat to the visitor writing here. We read that waterfalls are disappearing due to climate change and the construction of power plants, and the artist’s motivation is to draw attention to these processes. Then threatened waterfalls are listed – the Niagara Falls, for example, or the Victoria Falls in South Africa. But isn’t there much more to these works? All their strangeness now seems to fade into the background. The author, or in this case the artist, is not dead, as Roland Barthes claimed, but sometimes it is advisable to leave his or her intentions in the dark.

The exhibition leads chronologically through the work of Bogouchevskaia, who is the daughter of the Russian sculptor couple Ninel Bogouchevskaia (1923–1987) and Daniel Mitljanski (1924–2006) and therefore belonged to Moscow’s artistic elite from an early age. In 1994 she moved from the Russian capital to Berlin, where she still lives today. If you look at her works in order, you can see a development towards more abstract forms. While the early works inspired by family friend Marc Chagall still contained human figures – for example in reliefs that show meals at laid tables from a bird’s eye view – the waterfall sculptures created most recently are undoubtedly the most enigmatic objects.

A lot of things come from the time in between that make it easy to think about the boundaries between art and decoration and kitsch. Some objects with their smooth surfaces and animal figures – such as penguins waddling in a row on the cliffs of a silver block or the relief creatures mentioned at the beginning – seem all too pleasing. And the suspicion of kitsch cannot be completely refuted when it comes to the silver drops. Because even if the artist has changed the scale here and frozen the movement, it is simply a reproduction. Nature appears to a certain extent alienated in the portrait, but Bogouchevskaia does not interpret it.

The sculptor herself sees her sculpture, as you can read on an exhibition wall, as “post-impressionism” because, like the impressionists, she is dedicated to natural phenomena, fleeting moments and iridescent surfaces. “I like (…) that it was the Impressionists who paved the way for the October Revolution,” she is quoted as saying. In order to participate aesthetically in a revolution today, however, one would probably have to resort to other means.

»Fallen Falls«, until March 10, 2024, Kunsthalle Rostock