‘All This In a City’ (Danish: Alt Dette I En By) celebrated the artist Sergei Sviatchenko’s donation of a large collection of collage works to Viborg Municipality. The exhibition opened October 8th at the Viborg City Hall following Sviatchenko’s 70th birthday on the 7th, and its 24 works deconstruct and reinterpret the architecture and city life of Viborg through Sviatchenko’s artistic lens.
The donation of Sviatchenko’s artworks is a contribution to Viborg’s position as a city in the UNESCO Creative City Network and serves as an anchoring of the LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage and LESS Education. Both projects are supported by Østjysk Vækstbånd and realised by Skovgaard Museet.
The exhibition opening featured speeches from Ulrik Wilbek, mayor of Viborg; Oleg Sleptsov, president of The Ukrainian Academy of Achitecture, professor of architecture, Ukraine; Diego Mellado, head of Communication and Public Diplomacy at European External Action Service (EEAS); Christian Kortegaard Madsen, director and chief curator of Skøvgaard Museet; and Villy Petersen, former administrative director for Odense Municipality. Sergei Sviatchenko and his son Phillip Sviatchenko also spoke at the event.
The exhibition coincided with a fundraiser for the Danish Red Cross and their work in Sviatchenko’s home country Ukraine.
Sergei asks his students to repeatedly hold their hand in front of their face as they work, to see 'less' before looking back at the work.
The severe reductiveness of Sviatchenko’s interventions sets them apart...The swift cuts that Sviatchenko makes into his source pictures give them angular new outlines that can verge on abstraction. His strangely dislocated and sometimes otherworldly inventions offer moments of unexpected balance and repose in the turbulent image-stream.
— Rick Poynor, from the book ‘Sergei Sviatchenko: Collages’, 2014
Contemporary artist Sergei Sviatchenko has developed a method of collage by which just three elements are juxtaposed. By restricting the elements, a discipline emerges in the work.
Sergei asks his students to repeatedly hold their hand in front of their face as they work, to see 'less' before looking back at the work.
Sergei Sviatchenko with students @ LESS Akademie, Viborg
Sergei Sviatchenko with students @ LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Collage Garden Model, LESS Akademie, Viborg
Collage...is a true reflection of the world we live in today...[it] is all about the recycling, reinterpretation and reprocessing of our collective past, present and future.
—Gallagher, 2011
From the early 20th Century, through the work of Picasso, Braque, Hannah Hoch, Eileen Agar with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, collage has been a new medium for critical, irreverent and rhetorical image making. In the one hundred years of the medium, collage has developed into a salient visual language reflecting our fragmented image-saturated environment, and a potent voice for social, political, personal and global concerns.
Through LESS Education Workshops and studios around the world, students learn collage history and contemporary techniques in analogue and post-digital collage.
Sergei with Students
[ph. Per Fløng]
Teaching the principles of LESS
[ph. Per Fløng]
Sergei with Students
[ph. Per Fløng]
Throughout 2022 Skovgaard Museet and Sergei Sviatchenko collaborated to expand the LESS Education programme through various workshops for young people and students. At these workshops, the participants were introduced to the principals and methods of Sviatchenko’s artistic practice by both the artist himself and teachers from Skovgaard Museet. The participants also got to experiment with creating their own collages inspired by the artist, and one of the workshops became the basis of an ongoing exhibition at Marselisborg Gymnasium in Aarhus.
In 2023, Sviatchenko and Skovgaard Museet have already collaborated on workshops with students from Viborg Gymnasium’s visual arts and communications programme Visual HF as well as students from Viborg Katedralskole. Both workshops resulted in exhibitions, one entitled PLAYFACE at the former town hall of Viborg and another as a part of Viborg Katedralskole’s open day for new students.
[LESS, a Manifest, 2023]
LESS is founded in Viborg, Denmark, in 2020 by Professor Sergei Sviatchenko.
LESS is based on Sviatchenko´s LESS Principles – an artistic strategy of image making where a maximum of three elements are combined to create new meaning. As a philosophy LESS aims to condense and deduct until only the most essential remains.
LESS is based on analogue and digital collage and photomontage.
LESS is a collective of international artists, curators, scientists and art teachers.
LESS is anchored by the LESS Archive, which is a collection of collage art donated by Sviatchenko to the municipality of Viborg in October 2022.
LESS approaches collage as:
a philosophy
an artistic strategy
a didactic tool
LESS focuses on collaboration and experimentation.
LESS creates awareness and aims to add meaning and perspective to the world and to form critical individuals.
LESS works on a local, regional, national and international level.
LESS operates in any public space and in any institutional context.
LESS is apolitical and excludes no one.
LESS is promoted through workshops, seminars, lectures, publications, exhibition and the LESS Triennale.
LESS is represented, hosted and administered by Skovgaard Museet. It is funded by participation fees, sponsorships, company subscriptions and receipts from admission fees.
LESS is collaborating closely with the town of Viborg and the UNESCO Creative City Network (UCCN).
LESS´ fundamental goal is to develop a sustainable and innovative collage museum and teaching institution in Viborg.
Situated in the City of Viborg, workshops can be arranged by appointment.
[ph. Per Fløng]