About the exhibit
The allegorical self-portrait ‘Thinking of the Time's Birth’ is the artist's view of the Universe, and of the creation of a watch, through the lens of philosophy and natural theology. With this canvas, Konstantin Chaykin extends the cosmogony of time as one of the central semantic fields of his art.
The master presents himself as a creator, bringing a new world into being: his workbench divides the canvas as the horizon divides sky from earth, enacting the principle of the workbench as a model of the universe, in which the table becomes the heavens, while gears, screws and bridges take the form of the Moon, the Sun, the stars and a passing comet, much as they do in Albrecht Dürer's engraving ‘Melencolia I’, whose enigmatic symbolism has for centuries provoked scholars to read in it both an alchemical treatise and a portrait of creative genius paralysed before the face of infinity.
In this way, the artist leads the viewer toward the image of the fourth day of creation, when time was born together with light and began to flow according to the divine plan. Time here, as a creative force, takes on a literal, almost iconographic form. Engineering poetics meets biblical cosmogony: the executioner of the watch movement is granted equal standing with the demiurge, and artwork itself, understood as immediate thought, fixes this act of creation before it is ever realised in metal.
At Phillips' The Geneva Watch Auction: XXI, held on 10–11 May 2024, the artwork became the sale's leading sensation and sold for $63,438.
Cycle: Universum "The Figure of the Author"
The master presents himself as a creator, bringing a new world into being: his workbench divides the canvas as the horizon divides sky from earth, enacting the principle of the workbench as a model of the universe, in which the table becomes the heavens, while gears, screws and bridges take the form of the Moon, the Sun, the stars and a passing comet, much as they do in Albrecht Dürer's engraving ‘Melencolia I’, whose enigmatic symbolism has for centuries provoked scholars to read in it both an alchemical treatise and a portrait of creative genius paralysed before the face of infinity.
In this way, the artist leads the viewer toward the image of the fourth day of creation, when time was born together with light and began to flow according to the divine plan. Time here, as a creative force, takes on a literal, almost iconographic form. Engineering poetics meets biblical cosmogony: the executioner of the watch movement is granted equal standing with the demiurge, and artwork itself, understood as immediate thought, fixes this act of creation before it is ever realised in metal.
At Phillips' The Geneva Watch Auction: XXI, held on 10–11 May 2024, the artwork became the sale's leading sensation and sold for $63,438.
The depiction of Time, in the many forms it takes, is what defines my own artistic language — Horological Art.
