Exhibition

City as subjectivity

Place

State Museum of Urban Sculpture

Nevsky prospect, 179

Category

Exhibition

Date

24 october 2020, 12:00 — 31 january 2021, 19:00

Price

от 150 rub

Events / Exhibition

On October 24, an exhibition will open in the new exhibition hall of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture of St. Petersburg, which will present the city to the general public in a variety of subjectivities. The project "The City as the Subjectivity of the Artist" is a book, but not in the traditional sense of the word. "City" is an artist's book, and if not the world's largest project in this rare and precious format, then definitely one of the largest.

The book is perhaps the most versatile 5D media. It can be viewed and read, touched, listened to the "breathing" of pages, touch textures and even smell. An artist's book is a separate genre of art in which an artist (or artists, if there are several), creates a book from beginning to end. The artist's book was invented, solved in text, illustrated, manually printed and bound by the author. An artist's book is always a bibliophile rarity, often a museum-level work of art.

The city as an artist's subjectivity was created by the publisher and collector Timofey Markov and the artist and art curator Alexei Parygin. 35 artists from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan took part in the project. Among them are outstanding representatives of the direction of the artist's book, and the leading figures of Russian contemporary art, and their younger colleagues, as well as sculptors, photographers, performance masters, artist-writers ... Mikhail Molochnikov, Kira Matissen, Petr Perevezentsev, Leonid Tishkov, Dmitry Kavarga , Evgeny Strelkov, Mikhail Pogarsky, Vasily Vlasov, Valery Korchagin, Viktor Lukin, Viktor Remishevsky, Anastasia Zykina, Igor Ivanov, Andrei Korolchuk, Yuri Shtapakov, Vladimir Kachalsky, Alexander Borkov, Vasya Horst, Alexander Pozin, Andrei Chezhin, Gafur Mendagaliev, Spivak, Ekaterina Posetselskaya, Grigory Katsnelson, Igor Baskin, Yan Antonyshev, Nadezhda Anfalova, Igor Ganzenko, Alexey Parygin, Anatoly Vasiliev, Ella Tsylyakova, Boris Zabirokhin, Valery Mishin, Vyacheslav Shilov, Alexander Artamonov. Such a representative collection of eminent contemporary artists has never been gathered under one cover.

Each of the artists decided the theme of the city in their own unique style. The city has turned into a set of icons, a diagram, a genre scene, a walker game, and so on. Each of the sheets of the book has been hand-printed by the author using one of the traditional or new printing techniques.

The project has been preparing for 2 years. According to the creators, group projects in the genre of the artist's book have already become a good tradition: "Mayakovsky Manifesto" in 2013, "Birds and Figures" in 2016, "Russian Primer" in 2018. For all the complexity of the genre, the artist's book is a popular format in contemporary Russian art. He inherits two traditions at once - the traditions of Russian futurists, who printed their almanacs on wallpaper, shocking the audience with a different font and deliberate distortions in the spelling of words, and the tradition of the French Livre d'artiste, where Verlaine, Mallarmé and Balzac were illustrated by Pierre Bonnard, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall. Russian artists - enthusiasts of the genre in his introductory article to the publication are listed by the head of the department of the latest trends at the State Russian Museum, Alexander Borovsky.

The exhibition at the State Museum of Urban Sculpture will showcase the sheets themselves - engravings included in the book, and sculptures. The exhibition will last for three months - from October 24 to January 31, 2021. After that, exhibitions are planned in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan. Of course, the exhibition is not equal to the book, since the viewer perceives the exhibition only visually, and the book - with all the senses. But on the other hand, the exhibition fully demonstrates all the variety of artists' creative methods and the diversity and diversity of their works.