Nikolai Syadristy

The Chess men

- A tiny chessboard is placed on a pinhead. The piece arrangement is taken from a game between Alexander Aliokhin (black) and Raul Capablanca (white), for the 1927 world championship. The chessmen are made of gold.

Ukrainian Nikolai Syadristy is only a microminiature artist part time; when he's not creating ridiculously fucking small pieces of art, which is only a hobby, he's an underwater athlete. That's just absurd.



This book is probably my favourite of his works-- it has twelve functioning pages, which feature poetry that a viewer can actually read (with the help of a microscope, obviously). This book is the smallest in the world, which just makes it adorable, and is only 0.6 square millimeters.


Taken from his book, Mysteries of Microtechnology: "Microminiatures to a great extent reflect the attained level of treatment for various materials and, consequently, the degree of comprehension of their properties; they vividly narrate on the culture of human labour, thus, they actually dwell on the culture of human thinking."

Apparently the process is so absolutely intricate that Syadristy has to work between heartbeats and hold his breath as he works.

The Meeting

A jug, two wineglasses, a tray and an apple are placed on a sugar grain, although in complaint, a sugar grain is a fairly monumental surface so I demand the table to be set for four before I'm going to be impressed.

Ron Mueck

"I never made life-size figures because it never seemed to be interesting. We meet life-size people every day."

Ron Meuck is a hyperrealist artist from Australia, although he practices in London and was one of the YBAs. His work appears to be a series of scaled, both larger and smaller, adventures into the human form. Mueck is also one of the badasses that worked as a puppeteer and model maker for Labyrinth.

Dead Dad

1997

Dead Dad was featured in the highly publicized Sensation exhibition, and was a 2/3 scale replica of his father. Interesting, this is the only piece Mueck features his own hair in the end product. I think this is a particularly loving tribute, even if it's a bit unconventional.


The video below is a montage of some of Mueck's pieces, so the scale and installation process shown are pretty incredible.