Macau-based Russian artist Konstantin Bessmertny and his world of opposites
The artist talks about his new show at Macau Museum of Art, which includes a vintage Mercedes-Benz sports car, near-obsessive doll’s houses, and a two-metre wide painting of Queen Victoria
If you visit the Macau Museum of Art between now and the end of May, you’ll notice a vintage Mercedes-Benz sports car – auspicious number plate KB8888 – parked at the foot of the entrance stairs. Every night, as darkness falls, a thunderstorm begins to rage inside: an epic force compressed into a dinky vehicle.
“A car is a private space, really human,” says its artistic creator, Konstantin Bessmertny. “Then nature interferes and pushes the human away.”
Bessmertny, 52, who has been a fixture on the Macau art scene since 1992, loves to play with scale. Inside the museum, where his exhibition “Ad Lib” is currently on show, there’s another thunderstorm, noisily flashing within a small glass box above a tiny sheep, the words “One of you will betray me” circling, like a scriptural hologram, over its woolly head. Religious artistic references are rife in Bessmertny’s work; God is in the details.
Playing with such opposites – big/small, solemn/absurd, exquisite/vulgar – is a Bessmertny hallmark, and not just artistically. As a native of Russia, the largest country in the world and, subsequently, a resident of Macau, one of the globe’s more teeny corners, he’s had to adapt to conflicting proportions. He’s as warm and twinkling-eyed an individual as you could hope to meet, but that’s twinned with deep intensity: the photographer had to ask him not to look quite so furious in front of the camera.
When he was growing up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, everything was massive including the neighbours: from his city of Blagoveshchensk, on the Sino-Russian border, he could see the gigantic face of Mao across the Amur River. After studying at the Institute of Fine Arts in Vladivostok, he says, he tended to do more “monumental” things.
Once he moved to Macau, however, he found it (even then, before the 1999 handover, when the clichéd description was “a sleepy Portuguese enclave”) an “over-occupied space”. Creatively, he was Gulliver, trained in Brobdingnag but relocated to Lilliput. The world he glimpsed, like Alice’s, shrank at the far end of a telescope.