THEY / MOB / THE CROWD
Medium: Acrylic and encapsulated human genetic material on canvas
Dimensions: 130 × 80 cm (51 1/8 × 31 1/2 in.)
Vlas Kuzma creates a minimalist ritual that is anything but minimal in meaning.
Eight vertical black lines — sharp, precise, yet tremblingly human — rise from the base of a pure white canvas. At first glance, they resemble bars, hieroglyphs, or incantations.
But beneath this disciplined abstraction lies a radical proposal: each line is a reservoir of genetic material.
This is not just a painting.
It is a time capsule.
A reliquary for biology.
A visual score for cloning.
The canvas becomes a vault where identity, memory, and legacy are held in pure potential.
Kuzma confronts us with a collision: the material meets the sacred.
The body — reduced to code, to genetic residue — stands before the canvas, that sacred site of Western visual tradition.
By invoking DNA, the most intimate and empirical human trace, Kuzma aligns himself with a new kind of conceptual lineage — not only of artists, but of ancestors, and of possible futures.
This work exists on the edge — between presence and absence, between science and faith, between life and its echoes.
What you see is at once a funeral and a future.
Identity, stripped down to its rawest code.
A sacred act of resistance against disappearance.
« THEY / MOB / THE CROWD »
This is not a metaphor.
This is an instruction:
“In case of cloning, break open”
—Vlas Kuzma