Sand (1989)

The Sand [Песóк (Pesok)] (1989), is the first artist's book in a series of four Alexey Parygin author’s editions. The series Pesok (The Sand), Tsvetnye zvuki (The Coloured Sounds), Zelenaia kniga (The Green Book), Moia mansarda (My Attic) was created in 1989-1990 at the Nevsky-25 squat workshop (Leningrad) on the basis of the artist’s own poetic texts, the free-verse poems of 1987-1989. All books have similar format, stylistic unity of design, and are of limited edition.

Green Book. 1989. Book spread

Quotes

• These works are not conventional anthologies of poetry but clearly belong to the genre of artists’ books in which all the elements are united by a common idea. Although these are early works by Parygin, the artist managed to give each of them a distinctive tone that contributes to a polyphonic sound, characteristic of his book art. The first of these four books was Sand. It creates a feeling of the passage of time, like the grains of existence running through an hourglass.
  • Elena Grigoryants Absorbing the Futurist heritage: Vasily Vlasov and Alexey Parygin / The Futurist Tradition in Contemporary Russian Artists’ Books // International Yearbook of Futurism Studies / Special Issue on Russian Futurism. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. — Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Vol. 9 — 2019. — P. 281.