Dmitry Sayenko

Dmitry Sayenko (1965 Kiev) began to explore the possibilities of the artist’s book in 1993, two years before he graduated from the Mukhina Art School in St. Petersburg. Trained as a textile designer and printmaker, Dmitry Sayenko works with woodcut and linocut to produce his books in small, hand-produced editions which reflect his passion for creative printmaking and binding. He formally launched his Nikodim publishing imprint in 2000, and since then his works have been exhibited and collected worldwide, from London and Seoul to Hamburg and California. His books can be found in the collections of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; Gutenberg Museum, Mainz; Birmingham Museum of Art, UK, and Duke University, Durham, USA, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, amongst others.

He calls the artists’ books he creates ‘primeval’ as although they have been produced in the latter part of the 20th and now early 21st Centuries, they communicate and express a deep regard for the history and tradition of concentrated fine craft. He is passionate about managing all the aspects of production for his books, and will often make his own paper if he feels that there is nothing suitable to fit with the finished piece he envisages. Nothing is more important to him than the total relationship of idea, image, text, paper and binding. Sayenko’s books need to be picked up and handled, the sensory experience of the textures of covers and papers, the wonderful indentations and smell of ink on the page, his mastery of expressionist graphics, printed in intense blocks of colour combine with powerful effects on the viewer.

In his early books Dmitry Sayenko selected texts by authors including Alexander Pushkin, Daniel Harms and Marina Tzvetaeva to work with. He has a great admiration for these texts and an understanding of their work, which flows through his woodcuts, etchings and typography. There is a huge amount of energy in these books - texts and images are alive with the depictions of the characters’ daily struggles in life, they sing to the viewers from the pages as they wrestle with a range of emotions and experiences.

Over the last two years, Dmitry Sayenko has taken what he feels is a big leap for himself and started to write his own texts for his books, initially as short descriptive pieces for his bestiaries, and has now progressed to longer stories from his imagination such as The Tobacco Novels, which he produced in winter 2008. As he says: «For me this book is unusual because I took a risk in publishing my own texts. Before, I had tried to write but never dared to show the texts to anyone. In practice, almost all the written stories were dreamt by me and, having woken up in the morning, I needed to capture them in written form.»

Dmitry Sayenko published The Tobacco Novels in Russian, and English versions, each in an edition of 8 copies. Writing his own text allowed him to play with the semantics of both Russian and English languages as he invented fictional deeds by well-known characters relating to their personalities and historical actions. The book is imbued with a sense of credible nostalgia - even the paper he made to print on is the colour of amber tobacco. He is now content that in also producing his own texts he can become the true master of his entire artist’s book productions.

Dmitry Sayenko will also incorporate relevant existing materials in his books, such as old Soviet magazine pages (The Drawing Pin, 2004, for example, or the layering of newspapers into his handmade papers for books such as Readers of Newspapers, 2009), or include old banknotes to convey his pity for those who worship money to such extremes (Moneyria, 2004). Every component of each book plays its part in tune with the others and with his desire to express his ideas completely: paper, ink, wood, leather, rope combine to reflect Sayenko’s passion for both his message and his medium.