Since the 1970s Sergei Borisov has actively photographed Russian pop stars and rock groups for posters and album covers put out by the Russian record label MELODIA. After 1976 he became a member of the photography section of the Moscow United Committee of Graphic Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. Around the same time, Borisov started documenting the events of the alternative-art life of the Moscow Archive of the New Art (Mana) alongside Igor Makarevich, Georgy Kizevalter, and Andrei Monastyrsky. In his works Borisov seeks to convey the texture of daily life in the time of the Perestroika, with its incestuous relationship between the old and the new unfolding amid the ruins of the “civitas solis.” In each photograph, the sense of internal ruin is attained with a selection of run-down tourist-poster views of fountains, monuments, the kremlin towers, or the Moscow river embankments as background. His models were Boris Grebenshikov, Ilia Kabakov, Viktor Tsoi, Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe, Oleg Gazmanov, Zhanna Aguzarova, Timur Novikov, Anatoly Zverev and many other important figures of the Russian cultural milieu of the end of the last millennium.

Solo exhibitions of Borisov’s work has been presented internationally, including Manezh in Moscow, Jegge Gallery in Biel, Tochka Gallery in Moscow, and Kulturforum in Oberursel. HIs work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Moscow’s National Center of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum in Bern, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Haunch of Venison in London, and Saatchi Gallery in London.

Courtesy of the artist