Igor Golovniov spent 45 years photographing the world for Reuters, AP and AFP. His grandson Valera is 18 and paints crushed tin cans at 2×3 metre scale in hyperrealist detail. Together they have made something neither could have made alone.
The premise of The Dented Icon is disarmingly simple: take an object everyone throws away without a second glance — a crushed Campbell's soup can, a crumpled Dr Pepper tin, a flattened energy drink — and paint it at monumental scale with hyperrealist precision. The result is something that stops you. Not because it is beautiful in the conventional sense, but because it asks, quietly and insistently, why you never really looked at it before.
The project is a collaboration between Igor Golovniov, a Ukrainian-German photojournalist with 45 years of experience working for Reuters, AP and AFP, and his grandson Valera, who is 18 years old and currently studying at art school in Bavaria. Igor photographs the discarded cans — in controlled studio conditions, with the lighting and framing of someone who has spent decades understanding what a lens can do. Valera paints them. The canvases measure two by three metres.
"We are not making art about rubbish. We are making art about the things we decide not to see."
Igor's career has taken him across conflict zones, political events and cultural landmarks across three continents. He has photographed things that matter — or that we agree matter: wars, elections, disasters, ceremonies. The Dented Icon is, in some ways, a departure from that logic. But it is also its extension. The question that drove his photojournalism — what are we looking at, and why? — is the same question that sits at the centre of this project. The subject has changed. The gaze has not.
Valera's contribution is the transformation. The paintings reproduce Igor's photographs at a scale that makes the familiar strange. A dented can that fits in your palm becomes an object two metres tall. The dents, the creases, the scratched label, the warped metal — all of it rendered with the kind of patience and precision that hyperrealism demands. The objects become monumental not through importance but through attention.
The title — The Dented Icon — carries a deliberate tension. Icons are venerated. They are preserved. They are looked at carefully and considered sacred. The objects in this series are the opposite: discarded, damaged, ignored. The project asks what happens when you apply the attention of the icon to the thing that culture throws away. What do you see? What have you been missing?
The project also works as a conversation across generations — and across disciplines. Igor brings the eye of someone who has spent a lifetime deciding what is worth photographing, and the humility of someone who knows that the answer is not always obvious. Valera brings the patience of a painter and the unselfconsciousness of an 18-year-old who is not yet afraid to spend weeks on a subject everyone else has already decided is worthless.
The Dented Icon is currently in active development, with new works being produced in Bavaria. Igor and Valera are open to exhibition proposals and collaborations.