Hermitage, a story Sculpture

Furst_Ori are a British and Italian art duo formed by the artists Sergei Furst and Francesca Ori. Their evolution into a collective, or duo, began when they shared a studio in a sugar factory on the outskirts of Granada in Spain, a place they have recently returned to after a long hiatus in England. The mixed salad of languages they operate in and the constant exposure to one another’s work and working methods has led to their own artistic vocabulary; an idiolect of methods, materials, aesthetic and genres. They work together setting a theme and then produce collective works as well as their own individual pieces (the authorship of each piece is indicated in the description). As Furst_Ori they have exhibited internationally in England, Italy, Germany (Berlin), and Spain. Thematically they weave their work around the imprint and evolution that technological advances have been exerting on human behaviour. Their exhibitions, fusing many techniques and mediums together: sculpture, video, (video within sculptures) lightboxes, three dimensional collages, evoke the heteroclite impressions formed from a large cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer. Their installations and work create a journey in and around small visual theatres and narratives. Perhaps, for this reason, their most emblematic project to date has been the Art’s Council and Elephant Trust funded exhibition, Signs of Id, on an old light boat, LV21, moored on the Thames where the public followed the work of Furst_Ori into the bowels of the ship. The end point of the journey were videos projected into two air compression chambers - connected to the boat´s enormous fog horn - that the spectator had to insert their head into, and could only be viewed by one person at a time. Their work together has increasingly tended towards the conceptual and narrative, but always with a firm foundation in the plastic arts and graphics; Francesca Ori studied fine art at the “Accademia di Belle Arti” in Catania, Italy and ran her own sculpture based enterprise for many years and Sergei Furst as a cartoonist and illustrator for British newspapers such as the Financial Times and the Times where he had a weekly (and somewhat controversial) cartoon strip - although his background was Philosophy at Bristol University. In recent years Furst_Ori have divided their work into two main branches. The exhibition based contemporary art described above and an offshoot into affordable decorative wall art and sculpture.