Victor Danilov. "Games seriously"

The exposition dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Viktor Danilov (1946-2010) is deliberately focused on the presentation of his sculptural and graphic works of the 1990-2000s. The works, and there are more than 50 of them, complementing each other in plots and themes, reveal before us the author with a very original and direct view of the world, full of humor, irony and depth.

Victor Danilov entered the history of the cultural life of St. Petersburg in the late 1980s, quietly and seemingly imperceptibly. He was one of the first among the masters of the now well-known Ozerkovo-Shuvalov group, who equipped an abandoned village house as a workshop, filled it with a vibrant artistic life, gradually turning his creative abode into a kind of pilgrimage place for everyone who gravitated to art. Danilov attracted the attention of professionals, local residents, entrepreneurs and collectors who settled in this village. He turned everything that surrounded him into art. He cut pieces of wood lying under his feet, polished and gave life to sculptural works, which immediately became part of the interior of the workshop. “Old Europe” (1992), once royally sitting at the dining table, is now a museum exhibit (MISP collection), and touching girls, standing on stools and decorating a small garden in front of their creator's house, scattered among private collections.

Danilov's bold imagination allowed him to transform the simplest objects into extraordinary and vivid artistic images. Stones, plywood, building stairs suddenly acquired bizarre outlines, beauty of form and a certain meaning, unobtrusively penetrating into the living environment of the author and changing its aesthetic appearance.

We are not surprised by the strange characters that inhabit Danilov's world - thoughtful ladies frozen in eternity, carefree girls-"little girls" living out of time, wonderful animals, not devoid of character and sense of humor, unhurried representatives of the marine fauna. All of them are characters of this world, and the action taking place around is a game. Reality takes on a new meaning here. This is a game in earnest, which made its creator free and happy, and us, the audience, unwitting participants in a fascinating artistic action.