THAT IS NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
27.07.2023-30.09.2023
Creative unions often arise during the artistic migration to new shores. The drift to new outlines encourages artists to look for support: the desire to experience affinity without any fear of losing what they already have. Creative unions vary. Just like friendship, alliances just need affection, which is achieved very selectively. Artists, experiencing at some point the possibility of interaction and collaboration, were called "dynamic pairs". However, it's not just about alliances. Stable or situational, arising in the course of a joint project. The definition of the future type of creativity as a need for dialogue and communication reveals it in the perspective of expanding the range of possibilities among the artists opening up to meet another. This is a way to establish an inner kinship, not enforced and not thought out afterwards by art historians. Coherence is determined not only by the similarity of morphological character, but also by the attraction to similar motivating impulses of creativity, which have an implicit, indistinct character.
The expansiveness of interaction field creates the possibility of groups and associations emergence, which are based primarily on friendliness and affection, and only then a similar understanding of the aesthetic foundations of creativity and formal features. Involvement in the creative interaction orbit can also have a deliberately "unequal" character. Art, like the animal world, has its own niches and hierarchies, its own internal territories, which are not violated. This unspoken ethics of relationships can lead to a certain isolation that does not benefit art. Artists' reproaches for invading their sovereign territory are fair only in the patriarchal paradigm of the Middle Ages. The speed of information dissemination, as well as the possibility of rapid and impersonal influence, "infection" with the art of another, makes it possible to establish new horizontal ties within artistic communities and the possibility of creative enrichment.
When an accomplished artist with a name or a stable creative couple attracts artists who have not yet established themselves on the art scene as allies, this hand of support and recognition is the way to overcome the patriarchal hierarchy, an influx of fresh blood, which art always lacks so much.
To see an ally in a younger colleague, to feel how one's voice responds in a newly appeared melody is a kind of sensitivity and attention that creates a much-needed, almost ecological type of relationship in contemporary art.
At a time of disunity and crisis of relations, lack of opportunities for collaborations and the exhaustion of any unions, the appearance of such bundles is seen as a timid, but saving step towards building new connections in art. In the bundles formed at the exhibition, there is something connecting them all and even allowing audience to talk about a certain common line, the sum of gravities that determine the direction as a whole. It is somewhat close to the art that emerged in France in the 1940s, when two directions or types of creativity that were close at that time were identified: art informel and art brut.
Striving for the formless, letting the chaos of the forms of the disintegrated world into oneself, trusting inner vision and hearing, responding to the blind concussions of time, as well as the salvation of a heavy raw form and un articulated speech, trust in the infantile beginning of creativity – all this can be attributed to the general coordinate system in which artists work.
Gleb Ershov
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
<...>
Poem by William Butler Yeats
«Sailing to Byzantium»
VIKA BEGALSKAYA, ALEXANDER VILKIN × ANDREY SEMENOV
VIKA BEGALSKAYA and ALEXANDER VILKIN have been working together since 2014. Starting collaboration, both authors were already well–known, established artists, each with his own creative method and background.
Vika Begalskaya graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Since 2001, he has been living and working in Moscow. She is known for feminist projects. Co-founder of the art platform "Feminist Kitchen". In addition to the main media which is painting, she also works with video and performance.
Alexander Vilkin graduated from the Chelyabinsk Art College, the Northwestern Institute of Printing and Book Graphics, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art "BAZA". In 2006, together with Igor Mezheritsky and Grigory Yushchenko, he founded the art group "Prosthesis" in St. Petersburg. Since 2006 - member of the creative association "Parasite" (St. Petersburg). Lives and works in Moscow.
One of the most striking projects of Begalskaya and Vilkin is the puppet show "Aphrodite's belt" (as part of the creative alliance "Teresa"), entered the shortlist of the state Innovation Award in 2015, in the nomination "Work of Visual Art". In 2017, the performance was shown and became part of the collection of M HKA/MuHKA (Antwerp).
ANDREY SEMENOV — an artist who creates paintings and graphics in expressionistic style. His works are distinguished by vivid, sometimes flashy colors, loose contour lines and appealing to the stories of stigmatized people filled with subtle observation and lyricism.
Semenov graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, and then traveled a lot in Russia and Europe, which enriched his scene palette. Having a great sense of composition and color, Semenov creates deliberately expressive, but always masterfully fulfilled works in which a special magnetic romance of the world "beyond the line" of common life is manifested at a high artistic level.
"... Having made color, picturesque meditation his main character, Andrey Semenov managed to overcome academic schemes without rejecting the jewels of academic culture. He is one of the few painters who "build" paintings, while preserving the lyricism of a fresh impression and the expression of painting."
Nikolay Blagodatov
“Fish, duck women, skeletons, bottles, grandmothers wearing ”valenki" and endless arches and canals. Genre scenes of the Little Dutch Masters, transferred to the streets of Leningrad, to the Moika embankment or to the Lantern Baths. Browser feasts suddenly unfold in shot glasses, where conspirators in fur hats with earflaps bend over beer mugs. At some point, the canals of Amsterdam and St. Petersburg mix, the girls in the windows and the ladies in fur hats with a fleece, and the artist himself in a cap. And now Rembrandt flashes in the queue on Nevsky. Linking different epochs, the artist looks lovingly into everyday life, finding patterns, mystical signs, the metaphysical essence of everyday life. He looks at himself in daily self-portraits, turning out to be a hero of both art history and St. Petersburg streets. In this attention to the everyday life of the city, one can recall a number of other artists who studied at the same School several decades earlier — Gromov, Schwartz, Arefyev and others.
Semenov's painting is walking around the city, sometimes in circles, returning to the same places, to the same subjects, different times of the day and year. Sometimes returning, it turns out that these places are no longer there and only the memory of the artist and the painting remains."
Alexander Vilkin
ALEXANDER MOROZOV × IVAN KHIMIN
ALEXANDER MOROZOV works in various contemporary art genres: object, installation, graphics, video and painting. Member of "Parasite" group. Artist pays great attention to various artistic statements, studying their boundaries and interaction.
Alexander Morozov's projects raise a number of complex philosophical questions concerning the model expansion and functioning of art structure, the fixation of experience and representation of the environment physically located outside the cultural field, but within the field of cultural research, as well as the study of the dichotomy of the concepts of "nature vs culture" outside the anthropological paradigm. The artist's range of interests includes artistic limits and issues concerning cultural memory formation. Alexander Morozov is interested in art that has outgrown its formal boundaries, which have become philosophy, anthropology, sociology and life itself.
Participated in the XI Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale, in special projects of the 6th, 7th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in the parallel and public program of Manifesta 10, the Baltic Biennale. Nominee of the Artaward International Strabag Award (Austria, 2013), the Sergey Kuryokhin Award (2013), the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination "Project of the Year" (2019). (2019). Winner of the Sergey Kuryokhin Award (2019) in the nomination "Best Visual Project".
“Singbarer Rest" project is dedicated to the theme of cultural memory disappearance, Alexander Morozov reconstructs lost historical artifacts from archival documents, descriptions, photographs. The project recreates vessels from the Baghdad museum collection which was looted.
The installation speaks of a military trauma and shows objects destroyed in the most literal sense: ancient amphorae have physically ceased to exist. They acted as unwitting material witnesses and participants in dramatic events. The vessels were restored on the basis of reportage photographs, information from museum catalogues, Interpol and UNESCO databases, consultations with specialists of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage Museum. Recreating the lost objects, the author repeats the ancient Jewish ritual of breaking the vessels of the Shevirat ha Kelim (Hebrew: שבירת ה הלים) — this is the name of the cosmic catastrophe preceding the appearance of the physical world according to the doctrines of Kabbalah. Experiencing the trauma of loss, the world appears as a system of balance. The restored vessels remind of the possibility to restore the lost integrity to the world, to patch up the torn cultural fabric.
«The philosopher Mladen Dolar writes that there are two components in the voice: the first is the semantic pattern that we catch; the second is the background of the voice itself, its sound component, which he calls the "indelible remind". The indelible remnants for me are the cultural heritage — the nutrient medium and humus».
The project was realized with the help of ceramist Vera Svetlova.
IVAN KHIMIN is a graduate of "New Technologies in contemporary Art" program at the Institute "Pro Arte".
Among the artist's personal projects: "Asciiticism" (2008), "Features and Cuts" (2012) at the Navicula Artis Gallery, "There is No Time" (2015) at the Vinzavod Center for Contemporary Art, "Abstract Conceptualism" (2012) at the Museum of Modern Arts of St. Petersburg State University, "On the Stove, on the ninth bricks" (2015) in the gallery "Vertical", "Echolalia" (2019) and "Tops and roots" (2021) in the gallery Navicula Artis and "Radiance" (2021) in the gallery "NeNeMu".
Vershok is a Russian measure of length, the same as an elbow and a fathom — based on constants, universal anthropometric data.
The vershok is literally the upper part of the index finger. In 1918, this system of measures was replaced by metric, but, ceasing to be used, remained in the language, in folklore — sayings, fairy tales and myths. In his previous projects, Ivan Khimin explored computer code in its correlation with the first writing systems, finding some matrix points of contact in their very genesis and algorithm of existence. One of the starting points of this project is the observation that the vershki, being already hopelessly outdated measurement, nevertheless have not gone anywhere! Out of physical use, but preserved in the form of an iconographic Save sign, magnetic floppy disks had an official size of 3.25 inches; floppy disks of the previous generation 5.5 inches.But when we apply a vertex ruler, it turns out that their size is exactly 2 and 3 vershka, respectively.
PETER SHVETSOV × EMILIA SANGI
PETER SHVETSOV is an artist who works mainly with painting and graphics. One of the few representatives of his generation who has not left the "irrelevant", old-fashioned technology, but, on the contrary, diligently searches and finds new opportunities in it. He graduated from the secondary Art School at the Academy of Arts. Since 1992, a member of the Russian Union of Artists.
The main creative goal for Shvetsov is to "make beauty". In a nostalgic search for lost harmony, he turns to the past. Shvetsov is a vintage performer in the broadest sense of the word. Shvetsov's art is extremely emotional, so the artist still manages to shock, to strike a chord with the audience, familiarized, it would seem, to everything.
In the "Swamps" series, Peter Shvetsov presents a study of the painting boundaries on the example of one seemingly simple motif – a landscape with a swamp. The picturesque texture is tested here for the ability to convey the depth of the submerged quagmire, in which the look and meaning get bogged down. "Swamps" is not a pictorial series in the strict sense of the word, but a circle of works united by one theme, the initial desire to peer as closely as possible into the etymological essence of the swamp, into its picturesque depth.
Dmitry Ozerkov
EMILIA SANGI works in various techniques and with different materials: installation, performance, graphics, ceramics, found objects, old photographic films, diaslides, photos, videos, graphics, ceramics, installation. She worked (under another name) as a film artist, costume designer.
In 2015, she joined the "Parasite" group and exhibits under the pseudonym Emilia Sangi.
In the Magnum Esox project, Emilia Sangi continues to work with the image female mythological creature and presents underwear for a giantess. Sangi shows his heroine friendly and melancholic. The giant pike from the bottom of the Pike Lake languishes somewhere in the depths, defiantly absent, craves care and attention. In the myths of the northern peoples, both the pike and the giantess are scary, witchy and most often malicious characters. But the artist shows full empathy for her underwater friend, sheaths her, lures her to the surface, wants to please.
"I was walking along the shore of Pike Lake and thought that if a giantess lives here, she is completely different from what happens in fairy tales. She is the same girl as me, and other girls and women. Vulnerable and strong, beautiful and unhappy, cheerful and sad, loves jeans or underwear; dreams and can't; can, but doesn't want to; knows, but doesn't do; timid and brave; loves or fell out of love; remembered or forgot; didn't forget and hid for memory. Looks into the reflection of the lake and waits, or has already left."
Emilia Sangi
IVAN GORSHKOV × mrachnik
IVAN GORSHKOV is an artist, co—founder of the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art, a member of the Popular Frontier Studies group (together with Arseniy Zhilyaev and Ilya Dolgov). Graduated from the Art Department of Voronezh State Pedagogical University (2008).
"Artist of the Year" of the Cosmoscow 2017 fair. Three times a fellow of the Garage Museum of Modern Art's Young Artists Support Program, winner of the Innovation-2020 award, nominee of the Kandinsky Prize-2021. Participant of numerous group exhibitions: solo exhibitions of the artist were held in St. Petersburg (Marina Gisich Gallery), Voronezh (H.L.A.M. Gallery), Moscow (CSI "Vinzavod", Paperworks Gallery), Vienna (Knollgallery, AA collections), Berlin (Diehl CUBE), Paris and Budapest. Lives and works in Voronezh.
The artist is engaged in understanding the cultural codes of modernity, calling this process "the search for the crystal of the purest craze." He works in various techniques, but sculpture occupies a significant share of the works. Strives to maximize the palette of techniques, uses ready-made. The basis of the artistic strategy considers endless remaking ("find and improve"). An important part of this strategy is also called the search for successful coincidences, building a chain of circumstances necessary for a new situation in the work ("generator of happy accidents").
"In the project, we take my new works, part of which is artificial food on magnets. Mrachnik continues this theme with a series of wax polyps, which are also attached to sculptures by magnets. So everything merges into one whole, it turns out the contrast of "glamorous glands" and bodily, slightly creepy wax parasites on them."
Ivan Gorshkov
"The main themes of my works are myths and legends. These are the first standards that we face in our lives. The images that arose in childhood in our minds are forgotten, they leave us. They deform, fall apart and return to us in a new, bizarre combination. But the complete restoration of the myth is impossible within the framework of technological civilization and enlightened reason. This conflict is the main source of meaning for me. I'm trying to capture these fragments of mythological consciousness.
Recently, the theme of physicality has appeared in the works. The body as a metaphor for any materiality acts as an insurmountable boundary to the Divine. The images of defaced, "defective" flesh are both an illustration of the impossibility of turning to God, and an attempt to remove the concept of corporeality and turn it into its opposite."
Mrachnik
PETER BELYI × KATERINA VESELOVSKAYA
PETER BELYI graduated from Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Department of Ceramics and Glass. From 1998 to 2000 he completed a master's degree in the Department of printed graphics at Camberwell College (London).
In the installations of 2003-2008, he developed the concept of the so-called "memorial modeling", where the artist turned to certain models, mainly architectural ("Sch854" (2005), "Danger Zone" (2006), "Pinocchio Library" (2008) and others). In the works of subsequent years, the author continues the theme of aestheticization of global sadness, destruction, destruction.
Member of the Union of Artists of Russia. Full Member Of The Royal Society Of Engravers (Great Britain). Lecturer Smolny Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg. Independent curator. Participant of the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (the main project "More Light") (2013). Founder of the Lyuda Gallery project (2009-2016). Lives and works in St. Petersburg.
KATERINA VESELOVSKAYA was born in 1989 in the village of Yaylu in the Altai Nature Reserve in the Altai Republic. She received a bachelor's degree at the Department of Artistic Metal at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design and a master's degree at the Department of Artistic Metal at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design. Lives in St. Petersburg.
"The main media in which the artist works: installation, sculpture and graphics. Katerina, on the one hand, can do whatever she wants with metal and on the other, in her independent artistic practice she tries to break out of this academic tradition."
Ilya Kronchev-Ivanov
"Now my attention has been captured by iron casting — a hard, heavy and cold stuff that turns into a liquid luminous mass, so that it becomes possible to witness it in a few seconds. This is such an elusive borderline state — the transition from one form to another, the space between the lines."
Katerina Veselovskaya
ALEXANDER TSIKARISHVILI × LISA TSIKARISHVILI × GRECHT × VLADIMIR S × IVAN CHEMAKIN × KATERINA VESELOVSKAYA × GALIZINI × KONSTANTIN FON RIEBEN
ALEXANDER TSIKARISHVILI is a sculptor, painter, graphic artist, performer, musician, one of the founders and leader of the Sever—7 group, as well as co-founder and curator of the Kunsthalle nummer sieben gallery. In 2018, the Sever-7 group was announced the winner of the Present Continuous young Russian art collecting program, which resulted in a solo exhibition and entry into the collection of the M HKA Museum in Antwerp. In 2018, the Group was shortlisted for the 2018 Sergey Kuryokhin Awards and the Innovation Award, and in 2020 won the award named after him. Sergey Kuryokhin for the Lost & Found North-7 Expedition project. In 2022, a special project was presented at the Cosmoscow fair — "The Phantom Family of Kaspar Hauser" — a total installation created by the Jonjoli Flowers group, a new project from the Sever-7 group, with the support of the Sergei Limonov Foundation.
Alexander was born in Leningrad in 1983, his childhood and adulthood fell on the 1990s, which influenced his artistic manner and creative destiny. In 2005, Tsikarishvili graduated from the N. K. Roerich Art College with a degree in graphic designer. In 2013, he became a graduate of the "School of Young Artist" of the "Pro Arte" Foundation. Works in the genre of soil painting, sculpture and graphics, performance, installation. In his creative practice, he studies mutations of the understanding of the national, visual stamps and layers of media images.
LISA TSIKARISHVILI is an artist and curator from St. Petersburg. Works in collaboration with Alexander Tsikarishvili. In her practice, the artist uses fabrics and foam rubber, creating abstract, often biomorphic objects. The works are in the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
Samuil Marshak (DIMA KOROLEV) is an artist who performs under the name of a famous children's writer, graduated from the Institute of Psychology of the Herzen State Pedagogical University and the Painting Faculty of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. The artistic method of Samuel Marshak is based on the deconstruction of traditional academic painting. The author seeks extreme simplification and often introduces text into the space of painting. "The attempt to gain innocence and spontaneity, which make it possible to realize the unimportance of what is happening, is the main theme of my works," says the artist himself.
Lisa Tsikarishvili, Samuil Marshak
from the project "Gothic transformer". 2023
Oil on canvas, mixed media, textiles, embroidery
VLADIMIR S is an artist, works in painting, ceramics, sculpture, graphics. He graduated from the Stroganov Moscow Art and Industrial Academy with a degree in Restoration Artist.
Among the selected projects: "Goreslav Alien's Hut" (2019) — a group exhibition, an installation in Strelna, a group exhibition "Abandoned by God" in the factory space, "How to climb through the window" in the gallery "Closed".
GALIZINI is a mysterious artist, a master of black humor, a joker puppeteer, consciously working on the border of art brut and conventional contemporary art, thus questioning this very border. The artist works with natural materials: wood, textiles, clay. His techniques are static, the author tends to an absurdly antique manner.
KONSTANTIN FON RIEBEN is an artist, sculptor, creates objects by experimenting with a combination of different materials. In his work, he develops the theme of alternative history and progress, creates images of posthumanistic worlds and landscapes.
In 2012 he graduated from the Sculpture Department of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.
IVAN CHEMAKIN (b. 1986, Tyumen)
A painter, graphic artist, sculptor who works with the poetics of things and explores everyday life through the iconic system of everyday objects. The world of things for Ivan Chemakin becomes an assemblage point, an embodied scheme of the entire mechanism of modern life. Winner of the Innovation Award for 2020 in the New Generation nomination.
Since 2018, he has been cooperating with the Sever-7 group. From 2009 to 2017 he was a member of the association of artists “Parazit”.
Selected projects:
2023 "Cumulative volume", personal project, Navicula Artis Gallery
2023 "BSHDKM", personal project, DK "More"
2022 The phantom family of Kaspar Hauser, a group project as part of the art group Flowers of Jonjoli for COSMOSCOW 2022
GRECHT is a mysterious artist of the St. Petersburg underground. In his works, he turns to the method of fictional archaeology, creating his own micro-story about the history of unprecedented peoples and unknown cultures. His artistic language refers to everything man-made, unprofessional, peripheral, forgotten in art, but never reproduces any historical style of a particular culture or period.
Works in collections: Simon Mraz collection (Austria), private collections in Russia and abroad.
