Vladimir Kozin, Ivan Plyushch, Alexander Terebenin, Olga Rostrosta, Anna Frants, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Andrey Rudiev and Simeon Motolyanets are names of those who write the annals of art life of Russia today, and with whose creative works there appeared an opportunity for students of St.-Petersburg to get acquainted as a part of the Actual Art Program in the end of February – the beginning of March.
The Recycling Project organized by the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center since 19 February till 8 March 2009 is opened in the halls of the Hermitage Youth Educational Center with support of the St.-Petersburg branch of the State Center of Modern Art.
This time authors whose approach essentially differs from irony of soc-art or postmodernist substitution of senses were presented to youth of Petersburg. The generation which was born (and received art education) in the USSR has come to reconsideration of the cultural part as natural if not the only possible basis for new Russian art.
In Letters from the Empire Edge an artist Vitaly Pushnitsky has built sublime ruins of either Roman or Soviet province – from shatters of a firewood shed of his summer house. Material of the Intimate Diary by Shtapakov is not a canvas, but it is an old roofing iron which has been torn off from a roof. It is wrinkled, rusty, covered by spots of an old paint. Traces of a paint and a plaster on the peeled walls form dramatic landscapes without houses, trees and inhabitants in the Skyline Project by Alexander Terebenin. These landscapes are empty and without perspective, this ground is like in the first (or the latest) days of the Creation.
Artist Olga Rostrosta has created a knitted automobile especially for the project. The idea is obvious: the automobile is an object of a dream, a symbol of life success. For the majority of people it is a fruit of work, patience and economy which is got by laborious, persistent daily efforts. At the same time it is a toy, joy, memories about a child merry-go-round . and who does not like fast driving!
Marina Koldobskaya’s project Roman Holidays is devoted to Architecture which is a keeper of historical memory – whatever it was. Images of temples, porticos, arches, columns, bridges are shown like minimalist silhouettes, almost signs. Brought together, they make up a kind of urban landscape – like Rome? The Third Rome? Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad? Or a City as an idea? Meanwhile, wooden doors of dressers, bedside-tables, shelves which were found in old Petersburg houses or simply thrown out by owners became the basis for images. And Anna Frants uses a real Soviet slot-machine of 60th years in Carbonated Water Project, which is a pathetical found thing memorable to us. Computer technologies give a new life to old things. By means of a special facility the antediluvial equipment for water with syrup turns to a stylish multimedia device, some kind of the time machine. A spectator switches on a special device by putting down a coin in it,
and he gets not a glass of soda water, he gets a nostalgic video which shows that time is a relative concept.
The Recycling represents young people creativity of well-known Petersburg artists of the middle generation, and as director of the St.-Petersburg branch of Modern Art Center Marina Koldobskaya notes: “participants of the project perform aesthetic “recycling” as they create new visuality on the basis of images inherited from the Soviet epoch”.
On 22 February at 14:00 Jury Shtapakov, a participant of the project, an artist and a book graphic illustrator, gives a master-class on monotypy for students.
The Hermitage Youth Educational Center
The General Staff
The Palace Square, 6-8, 4 floor
Tel. (812) 710-95-30
The showroom is opened
from 12.00 till 17.30
Sunday from 12.00 till 16.30
Day off – Monday
The State Hermitage Museum July 28, 2009