Childhood Drawings

The Human as a Frame for the Landscape could easily be a retrospective tracing the evolution of the artist’s style from his earliest works. However, it is not a retrospective and the exhibition’s relationship with time is a complicated one, so the “early works” in the show are represented by the childhood drawings Pepperstein produced from the age of seven. Were they not been dated it would be difficult to distinguish works made during Pepperstein’s childhood and teenage years from his mature output. He says that his works emerge from a kind of ornamental structure, only to submerge again later, and it’s entirely possible that they continue to exist within in a regime invisible to us. Pepperstein himself seems to have emerged as a fully-formed artist with a developed style. Like a kolobok, the round bread roll from the Russian fairy tale, he rolls through various landscapes of art, bringing them to our attention and then disappearing from sight.

A separate installation occupying an entire room recreates the time during a school lesson when children put themselves into a through monotonous action (picking at the desk, looking out of the window or at the back of the head in front of you) or enter a real meditative state. Pepperstein’s meditations were focused on the teacher’s face, the most horrifying thing he could find in the classroom. Here, this face becomes the focal point of all nightmarish paintings: a monstrous Frankenstein composed of Goya, Bruegel and Bosch.