Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Scarecrow, an exhibition of new works by Sanya Kantarovsky (b. 1982 in Moscow).
“The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he transform a painting into an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds from the field where it is planted, but the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors. Actual torture can also be interesting, but in general that can’t be considered its purpose.”
Georges Bataille, The Cruel Practice of Art, 1949
“I made this body of work over the course of a year. I worked in increments, in fits and starts, getting to know the paintings better than I usually do. There are a lot of accidents here, some images from the imagination or dreams, and some from life, like my friends Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood’s dog Hera whose last days I witnessed last summer. Hera was like a broken marionette, her delicate limbs deviating strangely from what one would expect from an elegant Whippet. Her beauty was reconfigured by her proximity to death.
It was also a year of seeing many exhibitions, among them Figures du Fou at the Louvre, which prompted my own version of Watteau’s Pierrot. That painting always seemed perfect to me—the blushing artist on an artificial stage surrounded by an animated audience and a donkey whose eye bears witness to the discomfort of looking and seeing. The embarrassing erotics of it all! I removed the audience and left Pierrot and the donkey’s disembodied head. A kind of reduction to what I felt to be the most important elements. There are other simple scenes painted—two figures in bed, a dog and a tree. Most gazes within the paintings are downcast or turned away. Jamieson Webster pointed out recently that Lacan saw a downcast gaze as a sign of shame or humility. A terrible discomfort at being seen. In the words of Anne Carson, ‘shame lies on the eyelids.’ Maybe these painted bodies are extensions of my own fear of attracting visitors, and Pierrot’s blushing cheeks an inflammation of the uncomfortable desire that always already accompanies this fear of exposure.”
Sanya Kantarovsky, 2025
Born in Moscow in 1982, Sanya Kantarovsky immigrated to the United States at the age of ten. Kantarovsky’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including museum exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum (2022); Kunsthalle Basel (2018); and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017). His work has been a part of numerous group exhibitions, most recently the Aïshti Foundation’s Day for Night: New American Realism at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024); the inaugural exhibition at the Campus, Hudson, New York (2024); and I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice (2024). Kantarovsky’s work is held in private and public collections worldwide, of note are the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Courtauld, London; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Kantarovsky lives and works in New York.
Scarecrow opens to the public on Thursday 8 May 2025 with an opening reception on Wednesday 7 May 2025 from 6 to 8pm. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM.