Nearness

By Lisa Knoll

5/9/2021

Exhibition Details:

Nearness
Atticus Art Gallery, Bath
3 September – 28 November 2021
11a Queen Street, Bath, BA1 1HE, United Kingdom

Organised with the support of Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre

Image © Atticus Gallery

Atticus Art Gallery is pleased to present Nearness, a solo exhibition by Valeriy Iakovlev, realised with the support of Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre. The exhibition brings together a new body of sculptural works that reimagine abstraction as a language of care, attention, and proximity.

Working in bronze, aluminium, and cast composite, Iakovlev develops forms that hover between the organic and the elemental. Modelled and refined entirely by hand, these sculptures emerge through a slow choreography of touch — gestures of polishing, adjusting, and balancing that transform matter into thought. Their smooth surfaces do not conceal labour but contain it: each curve is a residue of time, each reflection a record of endurance.

In Nearness, Iakovlev reflects on the fragile equilibrium between visibility and silence in the contemporary world. His restrained, luminous forms approach the viewer without imposing, inviting attention rather than demanding it. The exhibition proposes sculpture as relation — an encounter in which perception becomes an ethical act. Against the noise of spectacle, Iakovlev restores stillness as a radical form of presence.

Valeriy Iakovlev (b. 1972, Russia) studied at the Repin State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Saint Petersburg. His practice explores the thresholds between matter and perception, endurance and disappearance. Living and working between Italy and Moscow, he continues to cultivate a sculptural language that unites European modernism with a post-digital sensitivity to fragility and form.