Svetlana Kopystiansky (born 1950 in Voronezh) is an American artist, active in New York City since 1988. She has a multimedia practice, including painting, photography, film, and video, with an investigation of language as her primary paradigm. On works in media of film and video, she collaborates with her husband Igor Kopystiansky. Her independent works and their joint works are shown internationally and held in American, European and Australian museum collections including MoMA, Metropolitan, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, Walker Art Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, ZKM, MUMOK Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Archives by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are located at the Centre Pompidou.Fonds Igor et Svetlana Kopystiansky. Kandinsky Library, Centre Pompidou
Work From late Seventies until late Eighties Svetlana Kopystiansky was part of a second-generation of "Soviet non-conformist artists" In 1979, Svetlana Kopystiansky turned to the avant-garde tradition. Her Correct Figures/Incorrect Figures (1979) commented on the work of Malevich,Svetlana Kopystiansky. Correct figures / Incorrect figures, 1979. Collection AGNSW while White Album (1979) was based on the concept of the “found object” introduced by Marcel Duchamp.Svetlana Kopystiansky. “Universal Space.” 1994. 430 x 880 x 360 cm. Collection MNAM Centre Pompidou. "Universal Space", série de sculptures et installations exposées pour la première fois à New York en 1990 The works on paper Plays mimicked Samuel Beckett's deadpan humor and meditations on life's banality and contained a reference to Alexander Rodchenko’s ideas. Kopystiansky started working on her two conceptually and formally related series- Landscapes and Seascapes- in 1980. Both series merge text with image: a closer look at either a landscape or seascape reveals a pattern of handwritten text filling the canvas,<ref>"Art and Text," Black Dog Publishing Will Hill, Charles Harrison, Dave Beech. London. Edited by Aimee Selby. 279 p. 2019. Textuality : Vito Acconci ; Fiona Banner ; Robert Barry ; Mark Bijl ; Xu Bing ; Mel Bochner ; Claus Carstensen ; Adam Chodzko ; Hanne Darboven ; Jeremy Deller ; Douglas Gordon ; Jens Haaning ; Gary Hill ; Roni Horn ; Svetlana Kopystiansky ; Simon Lewty ; Glenn Ligon ; Hayley Newman ; Simon Patterson ; Daniel Pflumm ; Tom Phillips ; Olivia Plender ; Jaume Plensa ; Simon Popper ; Richard Prince ; Ugo Rondinone ; Allen Ruppersberg ; Carolee Schneemann ; Jeffrey Shaw ; Catherine Street ; Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan ; Cy Twombly ; Cerith Wyn Evans ; Carey Young. </</ref> with excerpts borrowed from classic authors, such as Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Beckett and Paul Eluard.Svetlana Kopystiansky. Seascape, 2006. Oil on canvas. Text by Paul Eluard from the poem Lady Love in a translation by S. Beckett. Collection MNAM Centre Pompidou Starting in the early eighties, Kopystiansky began working on a series of paintings that incorporated found texts appropriated from international classical literature. In this particular series of works, she combined both visual and verbal languages, crafting the visual form from handwritten verbal texts. From a distance, these paintings may resemble seascapes or landscapes, but as the viewer approaches them and looks closely, they can discern the verbal text and read it.Contemporary Artists. St.James Press/Video Hound.Gale Group. MI 2001. Publisher Cengage GALE 1400 Pages. Artists, Architects, Photographers, History / General Editor: Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Advisers: Jean-Christophe Ammann, Robert Atkins, Szymon Bojko, Jorge Glusberg, Carin Kuoni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Frank Popper, Robert Rindler, Jose Lebrero Stals, Atsuo Yasuda.
In the creation of another series of text-based works, Kopystiansky handwrote found texts, extracted from novels, onto oil-painted canvases. Then were used the specific physical properties of the fabric, such as its elasticity, which allowed an artist to shape them into folds at her will. This way, Svetlana produced paintings where simple geometrical forms were outlined, and the material was arranged freely in various large or small folds. This approach resulted in the deconstruction of the original form of the text, with the new form giving rise to a new sequence of letters and signs. Thus, the visual form takes precedence over the text, causing the viewer's attention to spring back and forth between the visual form and the text, which, however, can no longer be read in its original form, since the words disintegrate and their fragments come together in unbelievable constructions. An interplay emerges between the text-reality and the words, or rather, the visual form of the words, as distinct from their semantic and phonetic aspects. The deconstructed text carries a reference to the ideas of international Avant-Garde and DADA movements."Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky". The Lithuanian National Museum of Art. 2023. Foreword: Arūnas Gelūnas. Texts by Michel Gauthier, John G. Hanhardt. Quotations from texts about Kopystiansky’s by Kai-Uwe Hemken, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anthony Spira, Adam D. Weinberg.(Lithuanian, English, French) “Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky” Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, 1991. DAAD. Curator René Block. Texts by Dan Cameron, Joachim Sartorius, Christine Tacke.
In 1988, she and her husband and collaborator Igor Kopystiansky left the Soviet Union and moved to New York City, which has been their home base since then.
In 1990 in New York Kopystiansky started a new series of large scale sculptures and installation works constructed from editions of books as found objects or readymades. In this group of works real books were placed in wooden boxes in a way that they become visual objects with pages open towards the viewer. For these works were used editions of novels in English.
Produced in New York The Library(1990) for which construction were used editions of collected works by Edgar Allan Poe is represented in the collection of MUMOK Vienna.Svetlana Kopystiansky. The Library, 1990. Editions of collected works by Edgar Allan Poe. The sculpture was exhibited for the first time at Castelli Graphics New York in 1990.Kitchen Art Benefit. 31 May-6 June 1990 Leo Castelli/Castelli Graphics, 578 Broadway, New York.
Universal Space (1994)represented in the collection of the Centre Pompidou was created using real books (editions of novels) and gymnastic equipment."Universal Space", série de sculptures et installations exposées pour la première fois à New York en 1990 Each book is affixed inside an individual wooden box, concealing the title, but forming a distinct shape from its pages. Both the books and the sports equipment used in this work are found objects. The installation creates a dual-purpose space, combining functions that are not compatible in reality, thus referring to the artistic ideas of surrealism.Svetlana Kopystiansky: The Library.” Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany. 1994.
For The Library (1994) represented in the collection of Reina Sofia Madrid were used editions of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth, and The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. Svetlana Kopystiansky. The Library (1994) Wooden box and books. Overall: 250 x 40,8 x 21 cm
In 1990, being in New York Svetlana Kopystiansky and Igor Kopystiansky received a DAAD artists-in-residency grant that brought them from the USA to Berlin, Germany, and resulted in their first solo museum exhibition with a catalogue, "In the Tradition," curated by René Block for the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, in the Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 1991.
In the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art Igor and Svetlana are represented with a two screen slide projection installation The Day Before Tomorrow photographed on the streets of New York in 1999.Igor Kopystiansky, Svetlana Kopystiansky, The Day Before Tomorrow, 1999. Collection Whitney Museum of American Art The work is exhibited as a two screen slide projection installation. At each screen is projected a slide program from 108 slides shot by one of artists with a dissolve transition between images. The program has a total duration of 16 min and is projected without sound. From more than three thousand slides shot at many locations in Manhattan for the actual work artists selected images shot at 9 different locations in the city. During the work at The Day before Tomorrow one photographic camera was held by Svetlana and the other one by Igor. Artists stood next to each other, a few feet apart, and shot what occurred in front of them – found situations from the real life of the city. Each artist took own decisions regarding when each shot should be made, which moment precisely has to be captured and how long should be a not recorded time gap between two shots. As a result were created two different records from the same event and each of them consists from different captured moments of time. At each slide was captured a moment of time which duration was just a fraction of the second determined by a speed of the shutter. In this way on selected sites were recorded events which unfolded in front of artists and which were entirely unpredictable in their details. Artists made shooting from the real life considering everything what happens in front of their cameras as a theater performed by many anonymous actors. By starting shooting of each scene they never new what will happen. The synchronized images gathered from different neighborhoods are projected without sound. The incidents are not connected to each other, and they flow from the juxtaposition of the two points of view. The differences in the two shots, the delays and anticipations within the action, create a sculptural theater that unfolds at different speeds. John G. Hanhardt, Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts, the Nam June Paik Media Arts Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Play of Time: The Art of Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky. Published in: 2010 Kopystiansky. Double Fiction/Fiction Double. Musée d"Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne. Texts by John G. Hanhardt, Philippe-Alain Michaud. Les Presses du Réel, 2010 Photographs, made on the streets of downtown Manhattan, were taken at eye level. On these images were captured people singularly, in pairs and in small groups who appear to be passing across the scene from left to right or right to left, entering and departing from doorways, standing and talking. The work was shot at the SCALA film, which is a material for a production of genuine back and white slides. Black and white image in photography and film has much longer history then a color image what makes an image look “timeless”. Only certain details of cloth can indicate approximately a historical time when the work was made. For the viewer’s perception of this work as a play of time might be complementary meaningful that all recorded stories took place in 1999, the last year of the Millennium.
As Adam D. Weinberg, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York did write in his text:Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director Whitney Museum of American Art. The Binary Method, Some Thoughts on Two Projects: Incidents and The Day Before Tomorrow. Published in: “Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky: The Day before Tomorrow”. Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel and Fine Arts Centre of UMass, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005. With introduction by René Block and Loretta Yarlow and texts by Adam D. Weinberg, Barry Schwabsky, Andreas Bee, Anthony Bond, Kai-Uwe Hemken. (English and German),