It is commonly said that the Russian avant-garde and its ideas about reshaping life are the most powerful sources of images in twentieth-century art. However, such talk has become trite, because for many artists the visuals of the avant-garde have exhausted their energy and power;
they have been diluted to devices of design, and the very value of the history of the avant-garde has been compromised by the art market, which has reduced the concept of value to price.
‘Workers’ Movement’ is an experiment in visual research on the vitality of the avant-garde’s formal ideas today. The title refers to the revolutionary decades of the twentieth century, the era of leftist utopias, collectivization, industrialization and cultural revolution. The most important spatial and visual principle of the avant-garde was project-oriented thinking. And that energy of project-oriented thinking is what ‘Workers’ Movement’ attempts to articulate.
The exhibition’s participating artists include the space of PROEKT_FABRIKA in their experiment with new visual dramaturgy. Nikolai Polissky will present his ‘Large Hadron Collider’ in Russia for the first time, a monument to the fearsome technological labor that humankind undertakes to unravel the secrets of the energy of the Universe. Polissky’s collider is not a stylization of the
experimental tool in Geneva that accelerates charged particles. Rather, it is an allegory of the eternal labor through which humanity discovers the secret of forms, from civilization’s archetypes to the fantastic inventions of Leonardo da Vinci and beyond, to the artifacts of futuristic utopias. Andrei Filippov continues the theme of the visionary artist by collecting
and analyzing a picture of the world in his intricate visual anamorphosis, while Valery Rivan has created a Suprematist portal, a theater of natural elements and the modes of human emotion. In epic canvases, charged primarily with images of the monumental propaganda of the first
decades of the Soviet Union, Egor Koshelev visualizes the energy and plasticity of Work, of Labor as such.
Arseny Zhilyayev and Ilya Trushevsky create force fields with minimal means, graphemes of space suited for disciplined, responsible creative thought.
Special Project of the Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.
We are happy to invite you to the opening of the exhibition on October 8, 2009 at 19.00.
