Born in Moscow, Russia

Graduated from the Art and Theatre College, Moscow

1996
Is a member of the International Federation of Artist & national Artist’s Union of Russia

1999
Begins his work in 3D

2007
Wins Art4.ru, competition on the best monument

2007
Starts working in his own style of “art-science”

Lives and works in Moscow

Kawarga is one of the few Russian artists working with high technologies. His most considerable works are based on science-art synthesis and are created with scientists and engineers.

MANIFESTO by Dmitry Kawarga – Radical of Biological Morphs

By naming myself a biomorph radical I have delineated an imaginary circle of my creative endeavours and distanced myself from any mainstream art.

I like to see myself as an experimental research scientist immersed into my own experience, as a biological instrument of art capable of bringing into life unseen psycho-physiological mechanisms, by ‘dragging’ their three-dimensional projections into reality.

The object of my study is the area accessible to tuning – consciousness, perception, thinking process as well as the psycho-physiological arrangement of other beings, including inanimate objects. I have had special, ‘intimate and warm’, relationship with art since I was a child. Each new artwork gradually changes my perception of reality and alters my reaction to life. These changes, in their turn, transform my priorities in art. I am curious where this chain of interrelationship will eventually lead me…

Up to 1999 I mostly painted, but my paintings were getting more textured, as if they were inflated and swollen, as if the surface of the painting ceased to be flat and developed reliefs. While a part of the surface remained to be flat, the other – the textured and raised one - strove to break free by turning into a three-dimensional sculpture. The moment it happened with the painting, my own imaginary obstacle was swept away. I realized that in the same way I could ‘drag out’ into three-dimensional world not only the images and symbols of visible material world while staying within the traditional framework of visual art, but also what lies at the very source of it, what causes it – materialized fragments of abstract thought forms, stream of consciousness, thinking process, fragments of perception, reflexes, Gestalt. And these would not necessarily be sculptures and installations, but peculiar artefacts extracted through immersion into consciousness and subconscious. My works are a synthesis of art and science and presuppose a bio-reversible contact with the beholder, they emit noises of various frequencies, tremble and react to the human touch and the rhythm of the blood flow.

The new series of interactive sculptures is titled ‘Unfulfilled intentions’ and includes amorphous and intentionally uncompleted structures containing robots inside them. They react to the touch of the beholder’s palm, to his/her voice, breathing and pulse by shuddering, moving, pulsing and humming as if being impregnated by each human contact, as if accumulating information from human bodies. Thus my creations are inexhaustible and ever changing, they absorb the energy, thoughts and rhythms of human contact.

The central part of the installation is equipped with a special device that transforms low audio frequencies into vibrations of various amplitudes causing resonant vibrations of the whole installation. It turned out that I exposed my biological structure by dragging it with hooks and chains and than animated it... All other sculptures sneaked upon by thin filaments of a vibrating and animated construction also represent certain materialized metaphysical processes, part of my own psycho physiological reactions.

My installation is an attempt to make communication links material. Not the global common links where all of us are interwoven and built into, but the model of it that is crystallized inside each of us. I tried to realize and examine the „structure“ that allows me to be tuned into society and be adequate to its demands.

If one comes to think about it, one can talk about self-determination of a human being in space and about the sprawl of information links. With the increased transparency and penetrability of our world, the aura distances contract as well since the compression of the living space is directly related to the increased speed of traveling between places. Paul Virilio said that in epoch of globalization with its increasing pressure of world time, the risk of an event disappearance becomes the very essence of our history.

When habitual models of world order are being split up, our individual consciousness changes too. A human being in a globalized world is next to impossible to be conceived as an independent and key figure of the universe. He/she is more likely to be perceived as a part of media field which is a cellular structure with no centre and boundaries being constantly compressed socially, politically, financially and, what is most important, in terms of information, while an individual escape from it seems to be not feasible.

Any action of an individual has repercussions along the chain, though this chain is already under a permanent pressure that causes shock reactions. This pressure has a global character as if it is inherent in all ties, structures and human connections.

An individual turns into a minute biological element – a tiny brick or a molecule in superhuman social mechanisms...

Dmitry Kawarga

By Joel Simpson

Dmitry Kawarga is a visionary in abstract polymer plastic, an extremely malleable medium that allows exquisitely detailed nuance of shape, edge and texture. It is completely white, so that form and shadow are the entire drama (except for his installation, see below). His art seems to be that of molding the rich store of forms generated by turbulent heating and pulling the medium, ending up with frozen (or “crystallized” in his terminology) forms that—if the viewer permits herself to see beyond the chaos—are marvelously expressive.

This article will consider three bodies of Kawarga’s work: Crystallized Thought Forms (2008), The Diffusion of Form Creation (2009), and A Model of Biomorphic Consciousness (2007). It will become apparent later on why we take them out of chronological order.

Kawarga’s Crystallized Thought Forms first present themselves as frozen flux—white polymer extrusions suspended in space or sitting on clear glass—but there are certain formal recurrences that can us lead to an understanding of Kawarga’s vocabulary in the medium, and ultimately of his themes.

Take #985, for example. The center of gravity is a ponderous mass, like a half-deflated spider’s abdomen, with a smoothly folding surface. This extends by thick extrusion into a kind of proboscis that sports two round enclosed extensions, like folded back antennae. Threads of plastic. like thin streams of pulled taffy, emerge from the central mass, as if shot out like firework streamers, losing their straightness in squashvinelike or smokelike curlicues, the most forward one ending by hold a tiny outline of a cube. If we accept that this is a “thought form,” we can make a number of humorous inferences concerning Kawarga’s insights into human cognitive products. The center is an emotional mass, easily imagined to be expanding, contracting, morphing (but “crystallized” for now into immobility) into an endless series of undifferentiated random shapes, held together by forces akin to the mental counterparts of gravity, inertia and molecular cohesion, powered by habit, need, and desire. We catch it in the process of metamorphosing into the beginning of another thought. The streamers are distractions, fleeting velleities, hopeless wishes that burst out from the center and mostly fizzle out in the surrounding space. The little box outline is a small gestures of logic—appendages, afterthoughts to the main mass.

Armed with such a gloss, the more complex #292 appears to be a large-scale thought-action, possibly a conflict between two or more thought-originators in verbal combat or trying to solve a problem from different perspectives. Denuded of their human bearers, who normally clothe their thoughts in decorous physical appearance and gestures of politeness (“Speech was given to man to disguise his thought”—Talleyrand), the thoughts by themselves appear quite monstrous, vaguely evoking dinosaurs, primitive fish, foetuses. As in #985, the central masses project smaller masses (“thought development”) as well as thin streamers. Here, however, there are many more outlines of cubes, and they are much larger. Some are bent. We can imagine that the contentious dialogue among these thinking entities invokes logic when appropriate, but it is just a tool and often distorted.

Number 498 uses these same tropes, but there is a ragged hole in the middle of the central mass and what seem to be more and shorter projecting threads. The thinking entity has apparently just experienced a devastating rejection or refutation. The distractions are apparently more numerous but more futile.

Elsewhere in this body of work, Kawarga seems to explore more extreme forms of thought. Sometimes the weighty emotional mass is absent, and all there is, is a twisted vertical cling-structure, with solid cube “roots” (a cute visual pun), and a flowering top with rows of button-like nubs (#979). I could see the thought form a true believer, a zealot, whose position is rooted logic, grows through narrow, anxious focus upon itself, and flowers in a repugnant blossom. Or what about #111, which extends like a reptilian jawbone with sharp but bent teeth, while the “head” is an interlacing of mostly thick doughy snakes culminating in a miniature abstract of the skull of a hammerhead shark? One senses that this piece describes intense, vengeful anger.

After working on this series for about a year, Kawarga was well equipped to represent a subject as large as the Financial Crisis as one of his thought forms. His version of it seems perfectly clear. The main mass is collapsed and folded onto itself, forming an off-balance “S” with multi-form detritus on top and bottom, that includes rings, bars and projecting prickles, with a frozen drip vaguely resembling a human figure hung by the feet, extending from the back of the top curve down towards the end of the lower upsweep—a picture of structural collapse and its dire effects on the Investor. Then projecting out from this structure is a crowd of cube outlines, surmounted by two large solid cubes and intercalated with a few smaller solid ones. The “S” structure to one side is the loss, the pain, the bankrupt investment houses, the vaporized savings, loss of wealth and collapsed social class and non-profit organization—all at the mercy of a breaking wave of empty value. The cubes, once again, are the arguments, the principles, the logic on which the unstable structure was built, now revealed to be overwhelmingly empty, with a few floating exceptions.

This last piece confirms Kawarga’s mastery of the visual language of his polymers. In a second body of work in the same medium, Diffusion of Form Creation, he takes it a step farther, unconstrained by the limits of his imagined topography of thought. Here Kawarga creates more convoluted and sometimes larger scale forms, using the shapes, twists, extrusions, snakes and cubes he had developed in his prior work. Thought, after all, may be physically formless, but it has its own emotional coherence generated by a virtual human subject. The works in his Diffusion of Form Creation series, however, begin to adumbrate a much more diversely formed natural world, the world that is outside the human mind.

The first one on display from this series seems to present a screen surmounting a row of grotesque plants. Roots or succulents, their identity is left ambiguous, but their inhospitable muscularity is clear. The screen above them appears to be the water surface of a pond, whose milky liquid contains arthropod bodies, some of which poke up above the surface, in two cases in series of decreasing size. We see things resembling segmented curved abdomens, ruined wings, jointed insect feet, and strange body extensions. Kawarga is not trying to be literal, but he evokes the pond as metaphor for a self-contained ecosystem on three levels: under water, above water, and outside the range of the water (the “plants”). Grotesque growth has been followed by death and decay—not that dissimilar from the economic meltdown.

The succeeding works in this series take the viewer into bizarre realms of plasticity well beyond those of the Thought Forms. Their elements include lines, braided twists, lipped tubes, bands, belts, clawlike fingers, rods, cube skeletons, apparent references to plant stems, sheathes, insect legs, intestines and other internal organs. Each sculpture is suspended on a meat hook, so floats in space, dramatizing its “rawness,” which here stands for Kawarga’s unmediated vision. Kawarga calls himself a “radical of biological morphs,” but this designation only conveys the nature of his sculptural language and does not hint at their power.

The sculptures themselves, without requiring the viewer to analyze them, heave their meanings at us, and we may recoil from their ferocity, abstract though they are. Their biomorphic vocabulary grabs us in those places where we store our emotional connections to bodily and natural forms, including some very deep, intuitive places; then they twist and combine them in radical and violent ways, to convey their savage warnings. His grotesque creations seem to be saying that we have betrayed our natural environment and our biological nature.

But Kawarga does offer some hope. His installation A Model of Biomorphic Consciousness, completed in 2007, precedes his other two bodies of work discussed above, but it offers an indirect affirmation of the possibility of connection with natural things outside ourselves, wherein may lie our redemption. It proposes no less than the exercise of empathy with an awareness that is entirely Other, entirely outside ourselves, that of a humble land snail. On a deeper level it connects us to our purely natural, pre-verbal origins.

Visually, the installation consists of a series of black boxes, open at one end mount on poles at different heights, steadied with guy wires, with smaller boxes acting as counter-weights. Polymer ascendants twist and tease out tendrils, resembling ginseng roots and brain cells, while heaps of the plastic suggest moribund arthropods, and a petrified octopus. It’s extensively interactive. As the viewer looks inside the various boxes and touches sensors, her pulse, breath, emotional excitement level, hand temperature among other vital signs are registered and communicated to the virtual snails through the conditions of their “habitat”: temperature, level of light, physical vibrations, and the frequency and intensity of faint electric currents. The snails react by speeding up or slowing down, by hiding in their shells and altering their muscle tension. Microphones and video cameras record the reactions of the snails inside the sculptures, which the spectator observes, and which in tern may provoke changes in the physical state of the spectator, which then, following the loop, are fed back to the environment of snails, and so forth.

Kawarga has thus permitted human spectators and virtual mollusks to interact in an intersubjective cybernetic system, harnessing each one’s “otherness” to each other at a reflexive, that is, involuntary level. It is an intensified, magnified demonstration of what happens at every moment between humans and the natural world that supports us, though most of us prefer to remain unaware. But it is also the implicit reply—if not a solution—to the conundrum posed by his later work, a 21st Century version of Voltaire’s injunction to cultivate one’s garden. We are creatures of nature. If we attune ourselves to our interdependence on the planet and all its systems which gave us our existence, and reign in our humanocentric, dominating attitudes (and the heedless greed of a very few) we can prosper. If not, we all perish.

Joel Simpson holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from Brown University and a Master of Music from Loyola University in New Orleans. He has variously taught English, French Italian, and jazz history at a number of universities, including Tulane, the University of New Orleans, Montclair State University, Drew University, Columbia and Fordham. Currently he writes art reviews for several publications and practices fine art photography, with recent shows in New York, Paris, and Tours, France. He is the creator of Dick Hyman’s Century of Jazz Piano CD-ROM (1999). His photographic work may be seen at

www.barbarian-art.com and www.joelsimpsonart.com

My installation is an attempt to make communication links material. Not the global common links where all of us are interwoven and built into, but the model of it that is crystallized inside each of us. I tried to realize and examine the „structure“ that allows me to be tuned into society and be adequate to its demands.
The central part of the installation is equipped with a special device that transforms low audio frequencies into vibrations of various amplitudes causing resonant vibrations of the whole installation.
It turned out that I exposed my biological structure by dragging it with hooks and chains and than animated it... All other sculptures sneaked upon by thin filaments of a vibrating and animated construction also represent certain materialized metaphysical processes, part of my own psycho physiological reactions.
If one comes to think about it, one can talk about self-determination of a human being in space and about the sprawl of information links . With the increased transparency and penetrability of our world, the aura distances contract as well since the compression of the living space is directly related to the increased speed of traveling between places. Paul Virilio said that in epoch of globalization with its increasing pressure of world time, the risk of an event disappearance becomes the very essence of our history.
When habitual models of world order are being split up, our individual consciousness changes too. A human being in a globalized world is next to impossible to be conceived as an independent and key figure of the universe. He/she is more likely to be perceived as a part of media field which is a cellular structure with no centre and boundaries being constantly compressed socially, politically, financially and, what is most important, in terms of information, while an individual escape from it seems to be not feasible.
Any action of an individual has repercussions along the chain, though this chain is already under a permanent pressure that causes shock reactions. This pressure has a global character as if it is inherent in all ties, structures and human connections.
An individual turns into a minute biological element – a tiny brick or a molecule in superhuman social mechanisms...

Dmitry Kawarga

"Rewriting Worlds: Dada Moscow" Special project of 4 Moscow Biennale of contemporary art Curator: Adrian Notz, Cabaret Voltaire Zurich Organizers: Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, Triumph Gallery, Moscow & Barbarian Art Gallery, Zurich One needs to go on a run-simulator to start up «a social mechanism». On the one hand - one feels himself as the God and on the other hand he is only figure among the others. The consciousness of visitors is bisecting - is the society absorbs each of us? Or we ourselves form this enslaving mechanism? If one tells in a microphone the manifesto "DaDa", the voice transfers a low-frequency impulse to the cellular structure, which begins vibration. As a result some of figures fall off, liberated from the structure. One conveyor has a microvideocamera. It shows on a monitor a space inside a black box – in this box is another reality, the world of the artist. "The work of Dmitry Kawarga normally deals a lot with ideas of biomorphism. A term and a small branch in art history that was very much influenced and formed by Hans Arp. Not just remaining in biomorphism, like Arp, Kawarga adds a whole new social and urban dimension to the works, that makes us think of terms like „rhizom“ promoted by the poststructuralists Deleuze and Guattari. For Dada Moscow Kawarga invented a totally new work, which seems to be qutie different to the abstract, biommorph works he normally does. It is an interactive installation that brings up a very powerful sense of the machine and technology fascination the society before the WW1 had and it also show the brutal consequences this fascination had. Kawarga creates a machine that brings the idea of Social Models totally to the absurd." Adrian Notz Materials: PC, run-simulator, conveyer belts, metal, plastic, audio device, subwoofer, microphone, micro video camera, monitor, wood cube.

Sculptures from «Paleo-Geo-Morphology» are artefacts of the human development. Convenience, the cultural «samples of a breed», has been extracted from the thicknesses of civilization. In the section of the object the viewer may see numerous compressed layers of industrial humus, amorphous and constructive form-creations, taking their start from the deep bowels of the earth.

"Structural Section 1"
polymers, glass, metal, water, glycerine 70x70x7 2012

"Structural Section 2"
polymers, glass, metal, water, glycerine 90x90x7 2012

"Structural Section 3"
polymers, glass, metal, water, glycerine 90x90x7 2012

in common with the studio of robots technic by Polytechnic Museum

LEXUS HYBRID ART

18-29 July 2012 Artplay Design Center
Artits: Agnes Meyer-Brandis (Germany), Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (Hydrogeny), Jon McCormack (Australia), Julius Popp (Germany), Mikhael A Krest (Russia), Mikhail Burtsev, neuromathematician (Russia), Ralf Baecker (Germany), Reconnoitre (UK), Ryan Wolfe (USA), Zilvinas Kempinas (USA)

LEXUS HYBRID ART Grant Competition Winners: Dmitry Morozov, Where Dogs Run group and Dmitry Kawarga.
Interactive kinetic objects
Try getting closer to these abstract object-like robots and you will find that they are only slowly and awkwardly trying to crawl away. These timid and supremely dysfunctional kinetic mechanisms are designed to stand in the way of our overwhelmingly rational minds, which subject everything to the laws of logic and pragmatic functioning, thus missing what is most alive and elusive. Communication with these irrational machines is meant to provoke a completely different thought algorithm in viewers. A conflict arises: the robot performs illogical and yet interactive motions, but the desire for tactile contact is accompanied by confusion. The clash of traditional expectations activates unusual schemes of interpretation, which are designed to enrich and upgrade the mechanism of perception.

"Model-4" from project "Club 21", One Marylebone, St. Martin‘s Church, London 500х700х300 polymer Bayer MaterialSciene, metall, PC, biofeedback device, audio device

Installation represents a design of biomorphic forms, geometrical boxes and plexiglass flasks with fragile sculptures of thought inside. It is attempt to gather a constructor of our consciousness, to reflect on its device and to try to simulate it in space. Biofeedback device reads off data and reacts to the bio-activity of one’s brain - it detects alpha, beta and gamma waves. The electric activity of the brain has a compound character. The unique sound pattern (equalizer data) constantly changes. One should secure the device by pressing the sensor to the forehead skin. A specially written computer program chooses one of many soundtracks depending on the reading of the device. This way the object reacts to the spectator’s brain bio-activity. In other words, the sound coming out of the object depends on the thoughts and emotions of the spectator.
At present five main brain activity frequency ranges are distinguished:
- alpha range (8Hz – 13Hz) – relaxation;
- beta range (13Hz – 45Hz) – active functioning;
- gamma range (45Hz – 60Hz) – altered states of consciousness;
- theta range (4Hz – 8Hz) – half-sleep;
- delta range (0.5Hz – 4Hz) – deep sleep.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2012
Dmitri Kawarga: Paleo-Geo-Morphology, Barbarian Art Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

2010
Topography of creative evolution (Kulik’s Hair), GriddchinHall, Moscow Area, Russia
Ouroboros, Gallery Brissot Art Contemporain, Paris, France

2009
Biostructures, Barbarian Art Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
Coming into the theme, Gallery pop/off/art, Moscow, Russia

2008
Trepanation of the Thought-forms, Gallery pop/off/art, Moscow, Russia

2007
Trepanation of the Thought-forms, Gallery pop/off/art, Moscow, Russia

2007-2008
“Photocompressing” Business House “Mohovaja, 7”, Moscow, Russia

2005
Biomorphic radicalism in the destructive synthesis, Gallery Sam Brook, Moscow, Russia

2003
Retrospective Cut, Natural Science University, Moscow, Russia

2002
Project 2x10, Gallery A-3

2001
Science-n-Art Project in cooperation with Honored Inventor of Russia V. Beshekov

1999
Saturated Landscape, Staraja Basmannja St. 21, Moscow, Russia

1998
Moscow World Bank, Russia

1997
Beljaevo, Moscow, Russia

1994
Musras in Theatre Perovskaja St., Moscow, Russia

1993
Kashirka Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Selected Group Exhibitions

2011
Art Moscow, Moscow
Rewriting Worlds: Dada Moscow, 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
Free Spaces, Special Project of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
Pro-Contra, International Symposium, Special Project of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia

The Life. The science version, Winzavod, Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Russia

New sculpture, Chaos and Structure, New Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Distortions of the Earth, Agency ArtRu, Moscow, Russia
Art Focus For Technologies: Charm and Challenge, Ural Forum “INNOPROM 2011”, Ekaterinburg



2010

Club 21, One Marylebone, St. Martin‘s Church, London, UK

The Kandinsky Prize 2010, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia 

Art Moscow 14th International Art Fair, Barbarian-Art Gallery

A New Formalism, Museum of a City sculpture, St. Petersburg, Russia

VOLTA-6, Basel, Switzerland

VIENNAFAIR, The International Contemporary Art Fair focused on CEE, Vienna, Austria

Reality metamorphoses, or Games with Time, Zverev's centre of contemporary art, Moscow, Russia

0,5 Jubilee exhibition, gallery pop/off/art, Moscow, Russia



2009

New sculpture, Chaos and Structure, Coluyanka gallery, Moscow, Russia

Good News, OREL ART gallery, London, UK

Art Moscow 13 th International Art Fair, pop/off/art gallery, Moscow, Russia

Preview Berlin, Germany

Basel Selection Artfair, gallery OBOIMA Project Bureau, Switzerland

VOLTA5, Barbarian Art Gallery, Basel, Switzerland

Night of museums, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Evolution of a dream, State Darwin museum, Russia

EUROP'ART'09 Grand-Saconnex Geneva, Switzerland

BridgeArtFair, New York, USA



2008

Atlantis, Gallery A3, Moscow, Russia (Curator T. Kostrikova)

Invasion: Evasion BAIBAKOV art projects

Bridge Miami Beach, USA

Cyberfest, Youth Educational Centre of State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Power of Water, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Tunguska meteorite, 100-years of falling, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Art About Mortality, in memory N. Konstantinova, Rostov on Don, Russia (Curator S. Sapojnilov)

Sleeping district, Gallery ArtMarin, Curator A. Panov
100% Black Square, Gallery pop/off/art, Moscow, Russia
Begehungen, Chemnitz, Germany



2007

Competition on the project a monument to Boris Yeltsin

7th Krasnoyarsk Biennial 2007, Curator S. Kovalevsky

Work is exhibited at a show-window of a museum ART4.RU 



2005

Art Manezh, Moscow, Russia

Art Moscow, (pop/off/art), Central House of Artists, Russia



2004

World of War, Museum Of Decorative Art, Moscow, Russia



2003

The Size Does Matter, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia

Object and Thing, Museum Of Decorative Art, Moscow, Russia



1997

Action Initiation, Art Laboratory Dominanta, Moscow, Russia

Bleeding of Spring, Malaja Gruzinskaja, Moscow, Russia



1996

Art Manezh, Moscow, Russia

Art Moscow, (Dominanta), Central House of Artists



1994

Fun-Art, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia



1992

Group Hummer Manezh, Moscow, Russia

Golden Brush, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia



1991

Malaja Gruzinskaja in Manezh , Moscow, Russia

Space and Spirit, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia
Group “Hummer” Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia 



1988

In Memory fo Pjatnitzkogo Malaja Gruzinskaja , Moscow, Russia

Labyrinth, Palace of Youth, Moscow, Russia

Public Collections

C-Collection, Liechtenstain

Museum of Contemporary Art, Art4.RU, Moscow, Russia



Museum of Ecology and Local History, Muravlenko, Russia



Museum Center of Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

Renowned international private collections