Small Motherland Automatic translate

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and FUTURO Gallery present Evgenia Buravleva’s personal exhibition “Small Motherland”. The project of the famous artist, one of the main figures in today’s Russian painting, is dedicated to her native places in the north of the Kirov region, and in a more universal sense - to the relationship of a person with the surrounding territory, the search for a true home, the restoration of connections with moments of elusive existence.

The basis of the exhibition is the new series “Unoccupied Landscapes”, which captures unremarkable, but significant for Buravleva location in the vicinity of the village of Vaga - fields, roads, hills, marked on her mental map since childhood. Buravleva is inspired by the ascetic nature of the taiga region and at the same time “reads” her native landscape with a caring critical eye. She notices sometimes unobvious traces of its transformation - be it as a result of agricultural development of the land, which was significantly reduced in the post-Soviet period, or, on the contrary, intensive, continuous year-round timber extraction.

Fifteen large-format paintings with a characteristically detailed, enamel-like surface are executed with special attention to lighting effects and the geometric tectonics of the depicted world. Forming illusionistic breakthrough windows in the museum halls, they are sequentially distributed throughout the exhibition in accordance with the four seasons of the year. This meditative pictorial calendar, playing with the archetypes of perception of landscape art, reveals an unceremonious and at the same time piercing, poetic image of Russia, where private experience and momentarily acute problems are coupled with eternal meanings.

The exhibition is complemented by two other specially created series: “Garden Partnership” - small graphic sheets with views of a dacha village near Kirov - as well as seven landscape portraits of the artist’s relatives and friends “from the back”, each of which works in its own way with a small space, natural and urban, not only in the Kirov region, but also in other regions of the country. Expanding the geography of the project, a series of portraits develops the theme of human creative activity to transform his native territory.

The exhibition includes working materials demonstrating Buravleva’s creative method. These include meditative landscape videos shot by the artist, preserving the immediate, three-dimensional impression of nature, and original photographs that serve as the basis for painting, and a film documenting the process of creating the works shown in the workshop. At the same time, the viewer’s path is accompanied by comments and notes from the artist herself - explanations of the depicted places, memories and reflections of an insider.

The exhibition plays with the transitional space on the stairs in a special way. It is occupied by the audiovisual installation “Distant Close”, performed in situ by Buravleva in collaboration with the composer, author of symphonic and electronic works Oleg Troyanovsky. The installation combines a wall painting – the gradually disappearing “all-season” horizon in Vaga – and a multi-channel sound score that creates a musical-spatial effect and reflects the synesthetic experience of the landscape.

About the artist

Evgenia Buravleva was born in 1980 in Kirov. Graduated from the Vyatka Art College named after. A. A. Rylova (2000), MGAHI named after. V. I. Surikova (2008, workshop of P. F. Nikonov), trained at the University of the Arts in Berlin (2007). Since 2009, member of the Moscow Union of Artists. Winner of the Moscow Art Prize (2023). Buravleva’s works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve and other Russian museums, in private collections in Russia and abroad.

About FUTURO gallery

FUTURO Gallery is an independent contemporary art gallery from Nizhny Novgorod, founded in 2016. The hallmark of the gallery was a unique ruined space in the Art Nouveau style, located in the building of the former apartment building of the City Society - a monument of architecture and urban planning of the 19th century. Working with guest curators, FUTURO has implemented many exhibition projects, including in collaboration with other cultural institutions. FUTURO represents both recognized artists - nominees and finalists of contemporary art awards, and actively developing young authors working with current mediums. The gallery regularly takes part in contemporary art fairs and is a member of the Association of Galleries.