Living and Dead. Ecological fantasy Automatic translate

The theme chosen for the project is “The Living and the Dead. Ecological fantasy" correlates with one of the most complex philosophical questions of life and death, in which, strictly speaking, Life is not opposed to Death.

The second main theme of the project was the connection between Man and Nature - a theme that confronts people with the problems of protecting the environment and the very survival of man on our planet. The cataclysms of recent years on earth, both natural, climatic, and social, convince us of the absolute relevance of a new appeal of art to the relationship between man and nature.

The conflict between two parallel realities - the reality of the natural environment and the environment created by human hands - is currently coming to the fore in the life of humanity, on which it depends whether it will survive on Earth or will be forced to look for another planet to continue life. The earth, in the presented works of contemporary Russian artists, photographers and sculptors, plays the symbolic role of a humanistic, unifying principle in an era of contradictions and discord in national and international state relations.

Creativity as creation, as the embodiment of light, truth, goodness and beauty, dominated European art almost until the beginning of the 20th century. Something went wrong in this benign picture of the world, especially during the period of intense social protests in Europe and Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and during the First World War. And creativity echoes these cataclysms, echoing the paradigm shift in the treatises of Western philosophers and thinkers who were the first to grasp these trends (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and then, in our time, to Georges Bataille). Now in creativity and especially in criticism there is a struggle between two principles: creativity is life, beauty, light, goodness and creativity as destruction, death.

The project is built as a complex labyrinth, which must be passed along a given trajectory in order to plunge successively into the waters of good and evil, light and darkness, life and death of nature, spiritual immortality and the frailty of existence, Heaven and Hell, heaven and space. Music will serve as your guiding light on this journey.

The exhibition is divided into sections, which correspond to the halls. The beginning comes from teachers and the older generation of creators who live in their students and continue to influence the development of art today. This is the “Continuity and Renaissance” hall. I am very lucky to present to you the works of the unsurpassed draftsman and teacher Dmitry Dmitrievich Zhilinsky, and next to him his no less talented and unique student Natalia Nesterova. In the catalog for Dmitry Dmitrievich’s personal exhibition, after his departure, she wrote: “We, his students, took different paths, each our own, but we never forget what he invested in us - love and service to art.” The development of art in the direction of “Living and Constructive Life”, “Earth Vibrations”, which culminates in the spiritual rebirth of man, his soaring to heaven in the “Living. Heaven". The “Inanimate” and “Life-Death” halls can be associated with the forces of degradation, darkness, destruction and death.

We would like to believe that the opposition between living and non-living, reasonable and senseless and cruel, which was clearly visible in the works of artists of older generations of the second half of the 20th century, will not become a radical diagnosis for all new generations of representatives of the plastic arts.

Let Tatyana Badanina’s “Wings” give the viewer a dream of a “promised land”, of a boundless and kind world that awaits each of us around the corner.

Participating in the project: Dmitry Zhilinsky, Natalya Nesterova, Aladdin Garunov, Alexander Yulikov, Alexander Oligerov, Alexander Sitnikov, Alena Telpukhovskaya, Anatoly Komelin, Anatoly Purlik, Andrey Dillendorf, Vasily Vlasov, Victor Reshetnikov, Victor Korneev, Vladimir Nasedkin, Vladimir Migachev, Gennady Troshkov, Dmitry Trubin, Ekaterina Kudryavtseva, Elena Belyakova, Irina Starzhenetskaya, Karina Nazarova, Mikhail Dronov, Natalia Tsvetkova, Natalya Sitnikova, Olga Bulgakova, Olga Khan, Svetlana Izgieva, Sergey Antonov, Sergey Bryukhanov, Sergey Nikeshkin, Suren Ayvazyan, Tatyana Badanina, Tatyana Hengstler, Tatyana Yan, Yulia Malinina.

Project curator Tatyana Paleeva.