Igor Sacharow-Ross

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Igor Sacharow-Ross

Igor Sacharow-Ross (born 1947) is a Russian artist who is considered a pioneer in the realm of interdisciplinary art. He consistently has pursued in his work the border-crossing concept of syntopy, attempting to overcome the perceived separation of the “world around us” and the “world within us.”

Sacharow-Ross was born in 1947 in Khabarovsk, Siberia, USSR, a city near the Chinese border to which his parents have been exiled. He studied at the Pedagogical University in Khabarovsk, worked there as a lecturer, and then moved to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1971, without permission from the authorities.

He soon found his way into the nonconformist art scene and secretly organized the first happenings and performances to take place in the USSR. His works, which at that time already included sound objects, were shown at the few exhibitions of unofficial art that he helped to organize and that finally lead to his deportation in 1978. However, these exhibitions attracted considerable attention, for example at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Arts club in Washington, DC, The Venice Biennale (1977), as well as the National Museum of Art in Tokyo (1978).

His early engagement with the concept of nature was prompted by his growing up in the Siberian taiga. He conceived of nature as a field of both destructive and beneficent primeval forces.

In the 1980's, Sacharow-Ross began working with molecular structures, such as cancer cells and leaf forms. The artist already at that point sought to combine natural science with concepts from the humanities.

Since the 1990s, his projects have become increasingly larger, both in terms of space and content. With the backdrop of the concept of syntopy, he has developed forms of artistic expression for communication spanning various media at the intersection of aesthetics and everyday thinking and acting.

He lives and works in Cologne and Munich.