Sergey Kondrashkin. Sculpture and myth.

The key to understanding the creative work of contemporary Russian sculptor Sergey Kondrashkin lies in the heroic epic of the peoples of the world. Investigating in his works the ancient myths, he seemed to pave the way for the viewer to the world of gods, feats and high aspirations. Heroes from completely different cultures, characteristic of both Christian mysticism and Eastern esoterica, appear in the artist's personal sphere. Among them you can often find Gilgamesh - a character from Sumerian legends, Xochipilli - the patron of art from the Aztecs, or the bird Magovei from Russian folk tales. All of them in this context are united by the desire of the artist himself to comprehend the power of the spirit and true knowledge of the world, of which they are vehicles.

But myths interest the artist not so much as the tales of the ideal heroes, but rather as maps, in which paths are marked to follow the path of life. He tests these trails in his real life. For Sergey’s artistic practice, his professional mountaineering is important, which allows you to truly feel “in the shoes” of the mythical hero, undergo severe trials and feel those soul movements that a person experiences only on the verge of life and death. Only on his own having conquered a difficult part of the way, consonant with the feat of some of the characters of the myth, the artist gets real inspiration, finds scenes consonant with his ideas and comprehends their wisdom.
Despite his passion for archaism, which is also characteristic of the modernist tradition, which is evidently abstraction, Kondrashkin remains faithful to the figurative depiction of human-like characters, but this technique has a conceptual subtext. Sculpture in the understanding of the artist should have a face, as in other matters, and all the phenomena denoting its existence in this world. The face is a kind of visual imprint of the internal content of the owner, so it is his image that enables the sculptor to draw the symbolic features most succinctly to reveal the essential nature of the created subject. Sergey practically in each of his works resorts to artistic reception of personification, granting “faces” not only to heroes, but also to phenomena.

One of the most impressive effects that Kondrashkin's sculptures produce is the sensation of life as a dance in the universe, in which his characters seem to go. None of them allow themselves to hang in the heavy static statics of the monument, on the contrary, they all seem to be covered by a rush of purposeful movement leading to the top, victory or harmony. Even the nature of the metal, which is heavy in its essence, cannot overshadow this dynamism. The artist manages to achieve such a dialogue with the material in which his plastic allows the sculpture not only to look light, but to soar above its own pedestal. The secret lies in the special technique of casting, in which the master "listens" to the metal and gives him a certain degree of freedom, allows you to "sound" and speak on an equal footing with the artist.
Sasha Karpova