"Sport is youth" Automatic translate

The Erarta Museum presents a group exhibition of artists reflecting in painting, drawing, sculpture and a collage on the transformation of the role of sport in society.

A group exhibition of artists of different generations addresses the current state of sports as a cultural phenomenon. The fervent exclamation “Sport is youth”, which served as the title of the project, resembles the slogan of Soviet sports holidays and at the same time an aggressive advertising slogan, the truth of which is always called into question. Having looked at this controversial proposition, the exposition is trying to trace the formation of a number of sustainable sports images.

The sport of the late XX - early XXI century did not completely lose its genetic connection with gladiator fights or bloody peasant games. So the work of artists Mikhail Gavrichkov, Elizabeth Berezina and Andrei Kartashov inspired by the warlike nature of bloody spectacles. Boxing fights or wrestling fights, of course, are an interesting task for the draftsman, allowing you to show skill in depicting the relief of muscles or create a powerful dynamic composition. But first of all, the artist peers into the personality of the fighter as an unknowable "other" - a person who has the happiness to indulge in a bloody instinct within the ring. It is curious that, in addition to the brush, Mikhail Gavrichkov and Andrey Kartashov willingly exercise with a weight, which gives them an additional understanding of their heroes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of cities and the emergence of clerical employees in need of leisure contributed to the formation of “physical culture” under the motto “A healthy mind is in a healthy body”. Gymnasiums began to appear in educational institutions, where a cult of the athletic body was formed, resulting in "parades of athletes" and mass sports events of the 30s. The traces of the machine aesthetics of the mass body turned out to be very tenacious in pop culture thanks to the equally flawless images of the artists Leni Riefenstahl or Alexander Deineka who praised them. At the exhibition in Erarta, you can easily find several obvious associations with this conditionally antique or even conditionally totalitarian tradition.

Since the 50s of the twentieth century, the spread of the media has led to an incredible jump in the popularity of sports. Oddly enough, the main achievement of mass sport was the appeal to the inner world of man, namely to the psychology of physiology. The collective mass action was replaced by the cult of the sportsman of the pop star, and the sport turned to the individual and personal experience.

Man today is more active than ever. He’s less and less going to the cinema and reading at leisure, the city dweller wants to act independently - not to read, but to publish his thoughts on the blog, not only to watch football, but to play it, or to take an active part in hooligan round-the-box affairs.

The idea of ​​sensoryism and the expansion of internal space through the body replaced the psychedelic revolution with its pathos of expansion of consciousness. The shift of boundaries and going beyond the possibilities occurs in the practice of extreme sports, in the presence of a kind of overload of the body. This is the abstract work of a veteran of skateboarding on the Neva Platon Petrov, who created a proune board, frozen in the fundamental position of Ollie, with which begin the blissful seconds of free floating in space.

The realistic portraits of Anna Karpova are interesting, which depict the thoughtful yachtsmen of the Gulf of Finland, contemptuously referred to as the Marquise Puddle from the 18th century. From these portraits, tanned wrinkled boys, who live marine adventures, and who have the happiness of communicating with the elements, look at us.

Here you can clearly see how the boom of the "consumer society" smoothly flows into the formation of a "society of experience" in which a person is willing to pay not for a thing, but for a certain experience that knocks it out of the routine, whether it is an emotional explosion in the jubilant crowd of the stadium or the purchase of a new model any manned object - from a skateboard to a super-fast car.

These brightest phenomena of modern mass sport are reflected in the exposition of the exhibition “Sport is youth”.

Exhibitors:

Sergey Belykh, Konstantin Benkovich, Elizaveta Berezina, Dmitry Prosyannikov, Pavel Ignatiev, Alexey Lantsev, Mikhail Gavrichkov, Ilya Zelenetskiy, Andrei Kartashov, Vadim Komissarov, Elena Kulik, Andrei Novikov, Petr Pereshivailov, Platon Petrov, Sergei Rozhnov, Natalia Rumyantseva, Alexander and Svetlana Roschenko, Masha Tregubenko, Egor Shchablykin, Nadezhda Everling, Ivan Aces, Semen Platonov, Alexander Seleznev, Anna Krasnaya, Andrey Zhuravlev, Anna Karpova, Andrey Pomulev, Stanislav Kazimov, Kirill Kipyatkov, Alexandra Efimova, Sergey Karev.