Eduard Bersudsky / Sharmanka

Circle of Victims from Millennium Clock Tower  1997-99  
wood, metal, glass, motors  3000 cm high
Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

Tower of Babel   1986-88
painted wood, metal, motor 300 cm high
Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, Glasgow

Eduard Bersudsky is the most interesting of all the Russian underground artists.  He developed his original, immensely complex carved and kinetic art in St Petersburg, during the grim, oppressive post-war Soviet years when it was still Leningrad.  While working as a naval engineer, he created his art in comparative secrecy, within a shared apartment, almost mute with despair. 

Those Communist officials who were aware of him dismissed him as a harmless toy-maker, just as the contemporary art officials of the West continue to do today, neither realising that within his fairground lurks one of the most incisive and hilarious critiques of human nature and society, not just for now but for all times.  He is one of the few artists who have revealed to us the contemporary face of death.  Bersudsky is today’s Hieronymus Bosch.

For more information please visit Sharmanka’s website: www.sharmanka.com