"In search of Aurea mediocritas." Automatic translate

The exhibition project in the Alpert Gallery is a reflection of Moscow artists on the relationship between nature and urbanism, on harmony and contradictions. The inevitable reassessment of man’s attitude to his environment, which has occurred recently, has sharpened the perception of this problem. On one side of the scale - the city with its social, cultural and industrial infrastructure, on the other - nature, air, endless expanses of fields and forests, the value of which we all felt so keenly during this period.

“The beauty of nature, like a miracle of the universe, absorbs and attracts a person. It scares a little and gives immense freedom. Infinity and laconicism, breadth and depth of the landscape, generations change, years, centuries go by, and it is still the same beautiful, eternal and immense "in the series" Fields of Russia "by Yulia Pokrovskaya. On the other hand, there is a city, a human creation, in which all the achievements and contradictions of the centuries-old work of thought have merged together. The grand and the chamber, the new and the old, the sublime and the mundane coexist and form a whimsical visual kaleidoscope. Large-scale construction projects and almost Suprematist compositions of building structures in Mila Gavrilova’s paintings are “temporary inconveniences” on the way to future comfort. The monotony of typical buildings, the monotonous movement of highways, which does not fade neither day nor night, it would seemdo not leave hope for finding harmony. The horizon at sunset, seen through an open window, in Inna Volvak’s Self-Isolation, is perceived as the only possible breath of freedom. A person wandering in the urban labyrinths of the series of works "Portals" by Irina Bogdanova can find hope of an exit, of merging with nature, only by raising his head and seeing a small square of blue sky, as a symbol of the heavenly world. Meanwhile, the underground kingdom of the city also lives its own life - the underground in the works of Kirill Stryukov. Not only the metro stations, but also Inna Volvak’s Lucas, as artifacts of Soviet history, hide behind them the mysterious underground world of the metropolis. The endless network of roads, electric trains and long-distance trains, taking city dwellers to the sunny coastal shores from the paintings of Alexei Lantsev, cut the compositions of the paintings in two with their lines,as if denoting a new artificial horizon. Community or loneliness in a crowd, the comfort of existence or a human anthill? There are no answers to these questions, or rather, they are subjective. Each author sees the city through the prism of his individual perception, but one thing is clear - humanity is faced with the problem of finding a golden mean, finding a harmonious balance of natural and artificial in the process of forming and preserving the habitat. However, the exhibition is not only about an actual problem, but also about feelings and beauty, because without this there is no art. The beauty of the city, sometimes ambiguous, met where, it would seem, it cannot be seen, becomes visible. Creative consciousness, working in a paradoxical way, spiritualizes and transforms the invisible into the tangible, the faceless into the expressive, and the everyday into the sacred.