Eli Sudbrack, Ancient visions always freeze, 2013
Edition of 10 + 1 AP
Numbered
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity
Hand knotted
Wool & Silk
High / Low Cut

Eli Sudbrack is the founder and driving force behind the artistic project Assume Vivid Astro Focus (AVAF), initiated in 2002 as a fluid platform for collaboration and exchange. Since 2005, Sudbrack has worked in close partnership with Christophe Hamaide-Pierson, the two forming a core duo whose practice often expands into a broader collective depending on the scope and context of each project. Operating across sculpture, video, performance, installation, painting, neon, and immersive environments, Sudbrack’s work dissolves boundaries between disciplines, authorship, and audience.

At the center of Sudbrack’s practice is an ethos of openness, pleasure, and shared experience — an insistence on art as a space for encounter rather than containment. Projects foreground personal expression and a pronounced vitality while engaging questions of free speech, civil rights, and the constructed frameworks of class, gender, and national identity. Drawing freely from pop culture, underground scenes, music, fashion, and political discourse, Sudbrack assembles densely layered visual fields in which references are continuously transformed and recontextualized. The resulting environments are immersive and chromatically charged, operating as both celebration and critique of contemporary culture.

Collaboration is fundamental to this methodology. Sudbrack frequently works alongside musicians, designers, dancers, and other artists, challenging fixed notions of authorship and emphasizing a porous model of cultural production. This approach is guided by a set of principles articulated within the project: to share, to be generous, to contaminate and be contaminated, to absorb and to disseminate — an understanding of artistic practice as an active, collective circulation of ideas.

For HENZEL STUDIO, Sudbrack developed a work in parallel with the 2013 exhibition Alisabel viril apagão fenomenal at Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, conceived as a visual response to the accelerated and often unregulated real estate development reshaping the city. The translation into textile extends the artist’s exploration of saturation, density, and spatial experience into a materially grounded format.

Works by Eli Sudbrack / Assume Vivid Astro Focus are included in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Selected presentations include exhibitions at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and Casa Triângulo, São Paulo.

Images: (1) Eli Sudbrack, Ancient visions always freeze, 2013 (2) Eli Sudbrack portrait. Courtesy the artist.