Vladimir Martirosov has been making kinetic sculptures for a quarter of a century. His current retrospective at Artstory gallery in Moscow as well as a smaller show in one of the city’s theatres, reveals unexpected and subtle relationships between nature and technology, dead and living matter, craftsmanship and art.

Vladimir Martirosov’s (b. 1975) solo show is a surprise, no matter how much you already know about the artist’s work. It is something between a cabinet of curiosities and a densely populated zoo filled with creatures that come to life at seemingly random intervals. All of a sudden paper flowers slowly open their paper petals, tiny bells begin to shake and ring, fans open like peacocks’ tails. Unlike famous kinetic artists like Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) or Theo Jansen (b. 1948), whose moving sculptures are mind-bogglingly complex, his creations look deceptively simple. The technology behind them is almost minimalist. Strictly speaking, it is not even ‘behind’. Martirosov does not hide the mechanisms, all the elegant clockwork remains in plain view. There is nothing digital about it – in the age of new media and AI, Martirosov’s art is defiantly low-tech. He utilises standard motors used in microwave ovens, or even those designed to turn eggs in chicken incubators.

Martirosov trained as a theatre set designer, and there is an inner theatricality to his work – in the shadows that move dramatically, a sudden jolt to the audience’s nerves when a sculpture comes to life, and the aura of playful magic that surrounds it. Yet these two veins of his work are in an uneasy relationship. “Theatre is where I make my money, kinetic art is where I spend it,” he says, welcoming me to his basement studio in Moscow, immaculate and filled with mysterious apparatus like an alchemist's laboratory.

Born into an artistic family in Tbilisi, he began constructing moving objects as a teenager, after attending an aeromodelling club. He says he was fascinated by the half-finished airplane models: without the paper covering, the wooden frameworks looked naked and beautiful. “I started building wooden structures just for myself and attached the motors that made them shake. Then they became more and more complex”. He always considered his creations to be art, not just toys, and his father, the muralist Alexander Martirosov (b. 1949), supported him in this. When he came to Moscow to enroll at GITIS (The State Theatre Arts Institute), his future mentor Sergei Barkhin (1938–2020), a renowned stage designer, told him: “Why do you need to do this? You are already an artist in your own right,” Martirosov recalls.

Kinetic objects are not welcome in theatres because they tend to take over the stage, Martirosov explains. He once designed a large mechanical fan for a production, but after a few performances the actors asked him to remove it because it was distracting the audience. His objects have a strange, almost organic life. This sets him apart from the earlier generation of Russian kinetic artists, who were fascinated by science and its power to change the world. Martirosov says he was not influenced by them, although he did once meet Vyacheslav Koleichuk (1941–2018) by chance. In fact, his ingenious works belong to the realm of fantasy, not science. He tries to “overcome their mechanic nature” by using time-delay relays that make their movement intermittent rather than monotonous. He often installs several motors with different rotation speeds in an object to make its movement seem “less automatic”: the parts move with a carefully choreographed irregularity that the viewer's mind can barely grasp. Made from materials such as bamboo, paper and very thin steel rods, they look weightless and fragile, more like strange otherworldly creatures than heavy machinery. “The Wave, one of his best-known sculptures, which has been included in several museum exhibitions, even has eyes – they are printed on its many paper panels.

The exhibition at Artstory, which spans two decades of Martirosov’s work, shows how he has moved from abstraction to more life-like creations over the years. Among his most recent works are copper plants and insects that move gently and mysteriously under glass hoods, giant flowers that open and dress their petals. Botanical metaphors seem to come naturally when he talks about his objects. For him, small spherical bells are “like parasites that shake and spread their sound like seeds”. Sound, be it bells or just the soothing hum of small motors, is an important part of Martirosov’s work. For the artist, the ideal environment for his kinetic sculptures is a white cube, where the play of moving shadows is best seen.

For all the relays, motors and calculations, there’s a subtle poetry to Martirosov’s works. They evoke a mixture of emotions – an acute awareness of the fragility of beauty and life itself, the thrill of discovery and meditative calm. Blatantly devoid of narrative and concept, they speak directly to the senses rather than the brain – an unusual and even surprising quality in today's art world.