ALCC Featured Artist: Sergei Isupov


Sergei Isupov is one of the featured artists to demonstrate and exhibit at the 
2012 Alabama Clay Conference in February. 

A short description of his work and career:

Sergei Isupov, one of the world’s most famous and loved ceramic artists, has been thrilling viewers for decades with this meticulous, surreal, figurative sculpture.  Born in the Ukraine, Isupov studied art at universities in Kiev and Estonia before emigrating to the United States in the early 1980s. His work is in museum collections around the globe, and he lectures and gives workshops world-wide. Isupov now resides in Massachusets, and is represented by Ferrin Gallery.

Isupov’s sculptures display an uninhibited celebration of imagination, human relationship, personal mythology, and freeform narrative. Painted images of the human form drape over, wrap around, meld with, and become a part of the surface of the sculpture, which is itself in the shape of a human form. The layered imagery is ripe with layers of meaning, conveying human pathos, tenderness, ambiguity, and humor. With jaw-dropping attention to detail, his work plays with themes of raw sexuality and the playful and delicate connections in all kinds of human relationships. His methods are meticulous but have nothing to do with realism. His forms and style are relegated to the odd and colorful world of dreams and memory. His means of communication are non-apologetic and arresting, and convey an intimate, personal and dramatic display of what could best be described as enthusiasm.

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