Exhibition “Structures. State Russian Museum: history of creation Exhibition of structure in the marble palace
The next - after the well-remembered "Current Drawing" of 2014 and "New Storytellers in Russian Art" of 2015 - the exhibition project of the department of the latest trends of the Russian Museum, headed by Alexander Borovsky, could have appeared last year, but it opened only now. The curators, department employees Irina Karasik and Vladimir Perts, collected the works of more than 50 contemporary artists to show the art they defined as “new Russian formalism.”
One of the main properties of any structure is its totality, so in the exhibition halls the feeling of crampedness is especially strong. Many artists are represented at the “Structures” with such a number and composition of works that it can turn out to be a small personal exhibition: Kirill Alexandrov, Vladimir Nasedkin and Tatyana Badanina are given an entire hall. In others there is a surprising juxtaposition of artists of different generations: Vyacheslav Koleichuk next to the works of Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev, Tigran Malkhasyan. In this mixture of eras, carried out by the curators as a principle, there are successes: the paintings of Alexander Dashevsky are in close proximity to the works of Vitas Stasyunas - these are two very different “Real Estates”, Khrushchev’s and new buildings of recent years, but the structure of domestic house-building, captured by the artists, has not changed. Architects and artists with an architectural background - from Yuri Avvakumov to Harry Fife in alphabetical order - stand out most clearly. But still, “Structures” would have become much clearer if Igor Shelkovsky and Mikhail Shvartsman had not been expositionally separated from Lydia Masterkova and Francisco Infante by several halls. A clear chronological sequence can reveal the structure, connecting art with the intellectual passions of the time - such as the structuralism of the Tartu semiotic school, which in the late 1970s was influential in the wider humanities community, not excluding artists.
The curators find the historical roots of the art shown in the work of Pavel Filonov, Vladimir Sterligov and his school - the structure was primarily an organic phenomenon for them. One can mentally supplement the exhibition with other names missing from it - Russian constructivists and, above all, Alexander Rodchenko, not only with spatial structures of the 1920s, but also with photographs of Stalin’s parades. And all the same, there is very little place for “pure formalism” in the history of Russian art: op art and minimalism were not developed and were not rooted in tradition, conceptualism found its expression in completely different forms, not without reason receiving the epithet “romantic”. It is time to admit that the national sense of form in Russia is opposed to structure, just as the Russian social sense resists any order imposed from outside.
According to estimates from lawyers of the Moscow Union of Artists, about 700 artists and sculptors may lose their work premises- 26.07.2019 On July 27, the Litfond auction house will hold auctions of paintings, graphics and decorative arts. The auction catalog contains 155 lots, from rare items from the first half of the 19th century to works created by our contemporaries
- 26.07.2019 55% of lots sold. Buyers - Moscow and St. Petersburg
- 23.07.2019 The traditional twenty lots of the AI Auction are ten paintings, four sheets of original and three printed graphics and three works in mixed media
- 19.07.2019 50% sold - 10 out of 20 lots
- 18.07.2019 This coming Saturday, July 20, the Art Litfond will present another auction of contemporary art at Winzavod, the catalog of which includes over 200 works by artists of the 1980s - 2010s
- 13.06.2019 Buy for five dollars and sell for a million. The passionate desire to win a lottery ticket haunts many inexperienced buyers. Don’t fool me with your books and museums! Answer simply: how to buy a masterpiece at a flea market?
- 06.06.2019 The premonition did not disappoint. The buyers were in a good mood and the auction went well. On the very first day of “Russian week” the top 10 auction results for Russian art were updated. Almost $12 million was paid for Petrov-Vodkin
- 04.06.2019 Having not yet dealt with the “millennials,” professionals of the global art market began to share the skin of the next generation of 7–22 year olds - those who are briefly called Gen Z. Why? There's too much money at stake to stop trying to give advice to young people.
- 23.05.2019 You will be surprised, but this time I have a good feeling. I think that purchasing activity will be higher than last time. And the prices will most likely surprise you. Why? There will be a few words about this at the very end.
- 13.05.2019 Many believe that such a high concentration of very wealthy people inevitably creates adequate demand in the domestic art market. Alas, the scale of purchases of paintings in Russia is by no means directly proportional to the amount of personal wealth
- 30.07.2019 The joint exhibition of the Hermitage and the Louvre is open in the Manege of the Small Hermitage until October 20, 2019
- 30.07.2019 In the Benois building until September 2, an exhibition is open of the first registered association of Russian avant-garde artists - the St. Petersburg “Youth Union”, which existed from 1910 to 1919
- 13.06.2019 Artworks created using artificial intelligence were brought to St. Petersburg. Among the participants is the French art group OBVIOUS, who managed to effectively monetize this work
- 11.06.2019 In the Gallery of Art of Europe and America of the 19th–20th centuries. from June 19 you can see selected works by A. Giacometti, I. Klein, Basquiat, E. Warhol, G. Richter, Z. Polke, M. Cattelan, A. Gursky and others from the collection of Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
- 11.06.2019 From June 19 to September 15, queues will line up in the Main Building of the Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka, 12, for an exhibition of about 150 works from the collection of Sergei Shchukin - paintings by Monet, Picasso, Gauguin, Derain, Matisse and others from the collections of the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin, Hermitage, Oriental Museum, etc.
Alla Urban. "Take-off structure - 3." 2013 Stainless steel, slate
Art object “Butterflies”
Structure is a quality of form that has serious ideological consequences. The exhibition at the Marble Palace is an extensive discussion about formalism, designed to prove the relevance of “pure” form. The exhibition includes objects by Kirill Alexandrov, Alexander Kozhin, Oleg and Olga Tatarintsev, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Viktor Votsky and other artists from museums and private collections.
Interpretation of text in the space of nonlinear structure. Refraction of space. 2014. Cardboard, plexiglass (black). Timing belt Victor Votsky at his art object.
Alexander Podobed. Untitled. Stick 2015
The exhibition, designed to prove the relevance of art of “pure” form, will present models or matrices of structures that are most common in the art of the past and present centuries and have turned into stable plastic motifs (lattice/mesh, crystal, chain, spiral, etc.).
Gleb Gavrilenkov. Expanding the topic. From the series “Object and Subject”. Oil on canvas 2016
The exhibition presents works from the collections of the Russian Museum, the New Museum (St. Petersburg), the Museum of Organic Culture (Kolomna), from private collections and artists’ workshops.
Victor Votsky. Art object. Fragment
The exhibition will run until May 29, 2017.Photo from the exhibition: © Alexandra Traube
Photo album from the opening
An art object by Kirill Alexandrov was used in the announcement of the article. “Tesseract (cube in the fourth dimension). Dedication to Mikhail Matyushin." 2015. Painted wood. Private collection, Moscow
The exhibition "Structures", which opened at the Russian Museum, presents more than 200 works by almost 50 artists. Fifty years ago the participants would have been in trouble: official criticism would have pecked them for their formalistic delights! The word “formalism” in our art criticism has long been a dirty word. Although this is only a search for the exact expression of thought.
Fragment of work. Alexey Kostroma "Nano 720" (2012). Photo: Alexey Kostroma
Here, for example, is “Skyscraper Woman” by Igor Shelkovsky or his “Cage House”: everyone could easily see such buildings on the streets of megalopolises. And his wooden sculpture “sitting” is somewhat subtly reminiscent of antique sun loungers. But this gigantic log house, intricately composed of wooden “corners” (“rotation structure” by Vitaly Pushnitsky), could well decorate some city square.
Many works, it seems, would be more reasonable to describe using mathematical formulas. For example, Kirill Alexandrov’s triptych “Destruction of a Sphere”: the author “explodes” a ball, turning its pieces into new spatial objects.
Art critic Alexander Borovsky also spoke here about the anatomy of the material environment: “Conceptualism has proven that fine art can live on ideas alone, actionism on direct actions. But formalism convinces: the study of the forms and structures of an object is more productive for the artist. It is eternal.”
In essence, the exhibition shows that every object has a skeleton, a structure. Revealing it makes obvious important, perhaps the main properties of what is depicted. It is no coincidence that Vyacheslav Koleichuk’s “Spatial Hieroglyph” makes you see a burnt-out forest in a black-and-white pile of crosses, and in Alexander Dashevsky’s “Dormitory” you see the honeycombs of a human hive, which the exhibition curator Irina Karasik wittily calls “a human tree.”
The exhibition demonstrates the inextricable connection between artistic consciousness and a scientific approach. So in Gleb Gavrilenkov’s canvas “Structure of Thought” we see an interweaving of either wires in the “stuffing” of a computer, or neurons under a microscope, but overall an expressive decorative panel that seems to be filled with talking signs, like an ancient ornament.
“In the diaries of Malevich’s student Lev Yudin,” says Irina Karasik, “there are entries that outline Malevich’s understanding of the phenomenon of structure. “Structure is an internal structure,” he said. - It can be determined by cutting the thing. We recognize it when the thing is being built. All living things are necessarily structural."
The exhibition covers a large period of time: from works of the 60s, for example, by Francisco Infante-Arana, to installations such as “Crystals of Time” by Sergei Katran, in which many hourglasses, immersed in a dozen aquariums, float, ringing.
“Contemporary art in Russia,” notes Irina Karasik, “turns primarily to social aspects, leaving the viewer’s internal, visual searches out of attention. If Western artistic practice went through a similar experience in the 1960s, then in Russia this stage was skipped , and subsequently remained undeveloped."
The exhibition "Structures" fills this gap.
A residence for artists is something like a hostel or dormitory, only it is certainly equipped with workshops where you can draw, take photographs or, for example, edit videos. Residencies are popular, there are more and more of them, individual artists sometimes move from one to another for several years, putting into practice the well-known maxim that an artist should be naked, poor and, ideally, homeless. The exhibition at the Museum of Nonconformist Art is dedicated to just such transcendental homelessness. Authors who had lived and worked in the art residence at the Pushkinskaya-10 center for the past two years were invited to participate, and they were invited to reflect on what home means to them. American artists Andrea Stanislav and Dean Lozov looked for an answer on the streets as part of their performance Reflect: they wandered around St. Petersburg in designer costumes covered with thousands of mirrored badges, and handed them out to passersby in exchange for a photo and an answer to the question “What is a house?” And the Japanese author Nobushige Kono designed a kind of dwelling for the museum from garbage found on the streets of St. Petersburg.
Where: Museum of Nonconformist Art (Ligovsky Prospekt, 53)
Price: 100 rubles
"Konstantin Somov. Painting and graphics"
The last time in Russia retrospective exhibitions of Konstantin Somov, one of the important representatives of the artistic association “World of Art,” were held in the late 60s and were timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Nothing like this has happened since then. KGallery fills the gap in its characteristic manner: the exhibition is based on works from private collections, plus individual exhibits will be provided by museums (for example, the Russian Museum and the Anna Akhmatova Museum). Among the rarities: all three existing editions of the famous “Book of the Marquise” - a collection of frivolous texts with Somov’s illustrations - as well as a collection of porcelain created according to the artist’s sketches, and a unique photo archive.
Where: KGallery (Fontanka River embankment, 21)
Price: 100 rubles
Georgy Vereisky
Simultaneously with Somov’s exhibition at the KGallery, the Russian Museum will host a large retrospective of Georgy Vereisky - who, by the way, also managed to be a World of Arts student (but a generation younger) and supported the revolution. Vereisky is a master of printed graphics, who worked most of his life in the experimental lithographic workshop of the Loskh. In addition to the graphic portraits for which he is primarily known, the exhibition will show landscape graphics: images of Leningrad and Moscow, as well as touching village landscapes.
Where: Mikhailovsky Castle (Sadovaya St., 2)
Price: 300 rubles
"Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic"
Where: Faberge Museum (Fontanka River embankment, 21)
Price: 450 rubles
After last year's success of the exhibition of works by Frida Kahlo, the Faberge Museum is preparing a new potential hit: this spring it will show a retrospective of Salvador Dali, which is being prepared by Spanish curators from the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation. This foundation is hyperactive, regularly opens exhibitions and even representative museums around the world and, frankly speaking, is overly commercialized. Conceptual projects united by a clear idea help improve your reputation. At the Faberge Museum, for example, the exhibition will be built around classical motifs in Dali’s works: for example, the exhibition will show a series of graphic illustrations for the famous autobiography of the Italian sculptor and jeweler Benvenuto Cellini, a series of illustrations for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, as well as the painting “Geological Echo. Pieta" from 1982, in which the artist reworked the famous sculpture by Michelangelo, stored in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
"Structures"
In the annotation for the exhibition “Structures” in the Marble Palace, the Russian Museum gives an explanation, translated from Latin: “Structure is structure, ordered structure, arrangement, order, connection.” In other words, this is a project about pure form, formalism - something for which in Soviet times one could be kicked out of the Union of Artists, but in modern realities it is more consistent with the criteria of industrial design than art. So, here, for example, they will show installations by Alexey Kostroma from eggshells arranged in even rows, geometric compositions from multi-colored porcelain by Oleg and Olga Tatarintsev and a spectacular wooden sculpture by Vitaly Pushnitsky.
Where: Russian Museum, Marble Palace (Millionnaya St., 5/1)
Price: 300 rubles
“NOM is 30 years old. Kings of St. Petersburg »
“Dramatization of idiotic manifestations of reality and idiocy of dramatic ones” - this was the ideological position of the punk group “NOM” at the time of its appearance in the late 80s. In addition to music, the team also solved this problem using alternative methods: they staged performance interventions in the urban environment, filmed short fiction films, and created a rock opera. The exhibition, dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the project, will show films, costumes, photographs, and also paintings by the artist Nikolai Kopeikin, who joined NOM.
When: April June
Where:
Price: 500 rubles
“Vasily Vasilievich Vereshchagin. To the 175th anniversary of his birth"
Vereshchagin in Russia does not enjoy such popular love as, for example, Aivazovsky, but there is a prospect. The main thing is to correctly place the emphasis: specialization in battle painting, personal participation in numerous battles, several severe wounds, and heroic death during a naval battle off the coast of Port Arthur are important here. Vereshchagin was a great patriot, but also a lover of travel; at one time he became very interested in the East, which, according to rumors, incurred the displeasure of the emperor and supposedly even burned several paintings after that. On the occasion of the artist’s 175th anniversary, a large retrospective will be held in the Benois building: about 200 works will be shown; in addition to Russky's own collection, there will be works from the Tretyakov Gallery and several other Russian museums.
Where: Russian Museum (Griboyedov Canal embankment, 2)
Price: 450 rubles
"Shifting Metaphors: Cuba in an Age of Change"
Where:"Rosfoto" (Bolshaya Morskaya St., 35)
Price: 150 rubles
Rosfoto is preparing a large exhibition dedicated to Cuban photography. There are no details yet, but the museum calls the project encyclopedic: according to the curators, it should describe the history of the island state from the moment Fidel Castro came to power to the present. In terms of techniques, the exhibition will also be diverse: it includes both works by classic documentary films and contemporary video art.
"Created Life"
Anna Nova Gallery is very late, but will still open an exhibition of the St. Petersburg photographer Yuldus Bakhtiozina, known for her staged photographs. With their help, in the manner of glossy publications and recent blockbusters like “He’s a Dragon” (for which Yuldus, by the way, made a poster), she studies Russian identity - she photographs guys in tutus, model-looking young ladies in Russian kokoshniks and metrosexuals in knight armor.
Where: Anna Nova (28 Zhukovsky St.)
Price: for free
“Under the clothes. History of lingerie design"
From the end of April, Erarta will host an exhibition from London's Victoria and Albert Museum dedicated to the history of underwear. About 150 items will be shown, from an 18th-century corset to works by modern world brands. All this was done not only for the sake of satisfying curiosity, the curators take it higher and draw parallels between the design features and styles of underwear and the development of society: for example, next to a corset made of whalebone, capable of tightening the waist up to 50 centimeters, X-ray images of the organs deformed by it will be displayed, capable of shocking anyone.
Where:"Erarta" (29th line V.O., 2)
Price: 500 rubles
“Manolo Blahnik. Shoes as art"
Where: Main headquarters (Palace Square, 2)
Price: 400 rubles
The Hermitage continues a series of exhibitions dedicated to the works of famous designers. Following the Italian fashion designer of the early twentieth century, Mariano Fortuny, comes the modern Spaniard Manolo Blahnik, the founder of the company of the same name that produces designer shoes. The exhibition will show about 200 pairs of shoes created over 45 years. Among the exhibits are shoes inspired by travel, individuals like Rihanna and Brigitte Bardot, created for the film Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola and the TV series Sex and the City, which, in fact, made the designer famous throughout the world.
“The Henkin Brothers: Discovery. People of Leningrad and Berlin in the 1920s–1930s"
One of the most unusual exhibitions of the Hermitage, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, is also the simplest. The events of 1917 divided the brothers Yakov and Evgeny Khenkin: one ended up in Leningrad, the other in Berlin. Both filmed the everyday life of city residents, into which politics imperceptibly invades. The ending of the story is tragic for both brothers: Yakov died at the front in 1941, and Evgeniy, who returned from Berlin in 1936, was soon arrested and shot by the NKVD. All that remains is a large and quaint family photo archive, which will be shown for the first time at an exhibition in the Hermitage.
Where:
Price: 400 rubles
New season at the Street Art Museum
In mid-May, the Street Art Museum will open its fourth season. The exhibition site will again completely change its concept; revolution has been chosen as the theme of the new project. The curators are the head of the Berlin street art project Urban Nation, Yasha Young, and the director of the museum, Andrei Zaitsev. Under their leadership, 30 artists from nine countries will present their artistic manifesto on the theme of destruction and creation.
Where: Museum of Street Art (Revolution Highway, 84)
Price: 350 rubles
"Anselm Kiefer to Velimir Khlebnikov"
Where: State Hermitage Museum (Palace Square, 2)
Price: 400 rubles
Probably the main exhibition of the coming summer: the Hermitage is the first to bring to Russia the cult German artist Anselm Kiefer, who has been consistently studying the phenomenon of Nazism since the late 60s. A student of conceptualist Joseph Beuys and an admirer of neo-expressionist Georg Baselitz, Kiefer is able to amazingly combine dark expressive painting with postmodernist techniques such as installation and performance. For an exhibition in the Hermitage, he is preparing a special project dedicated to Velimir Khlebnikov. For him, the artist creates about 20 canvases, starting from the Russian poet’s idea of the endless cyclical nature of fateful military clashes.
Images: cover, 1 – Faberge Museum, 2 – Rosfoto, 3, 4 – Hermitage
