Dimitry Vorsin’s Erotic and Surrealist Drawings Echo Dali and Da Vinci

Russian artist Dimitry Vorsin creates beguiling surrealist worlds populated with mystifying and erotic characters. Drawing influence from Salvador Dali, his figures are often elongated and with decapitated limbs. For example, one arm of a woman in a running pose morphs into what appears as a rat’s tail. The other is shown in a puppet-like construction, controlled by small nymphs wearing tall spiraling headwraps that match the woman’s own grandiose headware. The sexually fraught image suggests the power of the psyche to serve as a symbolic whip.

Vorsin is concerned not only with the surrealists who came before him, but he is also interested in the Italian Renaissance, as evidenced by his studies on the human form. In one drawing, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is turned backwards and endowed with an extra limb. He cries into one arm and raises a second, clawing at a bullet-ridden wall in an attempt to escape perfection. A third arm wraps around the man’s back, listlessly resting under a nautical window containing an angel who daydreams as hordes of gold coins escape out the open hatchet.

Considered as a whole, Vorsin’s corpus of images offer compelling twists on themes preoccupying Western art history, such as the search for the idealized form; the relation between science and religion; and the triangulated power play between artist, subject and viewer.