There is something very fascinating about art that is dedicated to animals, and Sergey Bobkov’s animal sculptures made from wood chips are almost surreal.
The life-sized animals can be mistaken for a taxidermist’s work but the 55 year old Russian uses small chips and slivers of plain wood to carve. The animal sculptures are so well-crafted that the fur and feather look almost real.
All of Mr. Bobkov’s animals are of Siberian in origin his wood chip technique is so unique that he even has a patent for the method. The present collection includes 15 animal pieces that he exhibited in a school at Kozhany, southwest of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.
Russia is the land of social realism and Mr. Bobkov has proven that it could also be the land of animal realism (if such a term could exist)! A lot of people feel weird about accepting taxidermy as a form of art and these animal sculptures wouldn’t elicit morbid feelings as they are not stuffed dead animals.
The more you look at these sculptures, the more real they feel and that is one of the reasons why I think these sculptures represent an alternate form of realism in Russian art. You could also go ahead and take a look at the Dr. Seuss-inspired Taxidermy and Steampunk Taxidermy which we had covered sometime ago.
