Exhibition "Bronnaya, 10" Automatic translate

Syntax Gallery is pleased to present a new group exhibition "Bronnaya 10", which will feature sculptures and objects by Alexander Kosolapov, Vitas Stasyunas and Leonid Sokhransky.

Indexes and Beasts

The exhibition "Bronnaya, 10" is named after the address of the workshop. The workshop, like the exhibition, brought together three eminent artists working with the theme of ideological undermining the autonomous territory of beauty and deconstructing ideological clichés: Alexander Kosolapov, Vitas Stasyunas and Leonid Sokhransky.

For all three, the theme of metamorphoses-mutations of the stereotyped self-satisfied language of the contemporary art advertising presentation is important for the sake of revealing uncomfortable, hidden werewolf images that radically strain the system of habitual media consumption of art. Both Kosolapov, and Sokhransky, and Stasiunas love to work with unyielding, difficult material, to expose its uncomfortable dense nature. When you get into their common workshop at 10 Bronnaya, you feel keenly that the atmosphere of this old Moscow studio, impressive for its pictorial chaos, perfectly supports the idea of ​​presenting art as a process of handicraft, which is important today.

I remember the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery “Variety. Unity. Contemporary European Art. Each of the three exhibitors of Bronnaya, by the way, could decorate it with their own works. At this exhibition, I was struck by an honest diagnosis of the situation, not only aesthetic, but also geopolitical. Europe, with its complexes of new problems of borders, migration, ethnic chaos, labor protection and ecology, in the arrangement of the exhibited works resembles a huge flea market, a flea market. Large narratives are split, in the works of stars of the first magnitude (Kattelan, Kabakov, Kiefer, Richter, Boltansky), ideas-constants crumbled into some small crumbs-artifacts. Their collections are like pieces of a huge mosaic, which no one can put together into one puzzle. However, there are opportunities to collect your personal story about a new European identity. Everyone who came

The world has become very simple and complicated at the same time. And the atmosphere of a craft workshop, a workshop where either sacred artifacts are produced, or the products of souvenir shops, is very much in line with this theme. Therefore, the exhibition "Bronnaya, 10" turns out to be an exact hit on the nerve of time. Handicraft man-made production, which is generously presented in the works of three artists, draws to another idea that is relevant today. She was bequeathed by Marcel Duchamp. In the craft, the rich semantic field of interpretations is reset to zero, and the index, the sign, as such, becomes the main one. According to the classification of the father of semiotics, Charles Pierce, the index is physically attached to the object it points to, it does not state anything, it simply shows.

Marcel Duchamp worked with the indexical nature of the image, not only in ready-mades, but also in making imitative copies of reality, whether it was “female fig leaves” made of galvanized plaster, or the famous peep-show photograph “Given: 1. Waterfall. 2. Luminous gas. In this diorama, Duchamp radically destroys the old conventions of "correct" communication with art. Makes a choice in favor of an intimate look through a hole in the closet door. The trajectory of the gaze directed to the point between the model’s legs does not give the viewer any chance to symbolically valorize his "encounter with the beautiful".

The entry into the back room of the ideas of three artists, Kosolapov, Sokhransky, Stasyunas, causes a similar effect of involuntary voyeurism behind the scattered indexes of some large narratives. The great thing is that none of the works claims to be a global generalization. They are just fragments of plots. And the ghost of a typical Moscow flea market already looms very clearly.

Alexander Kosolapov communicates directly with Duchamp indices. Duchamp’s images of chess, for which he "stopped painting" in 1920, are complemented by women’s fig leaves made in bronze. They became pieces in the intended party. Mass culture helps to reduce any philosophical maxim to the state of confetti or candy wrapper. Therefore, it is natural that images of comics, treshart slipped into the workshop of three artists. In the case of Kosolapov, this is Mickey Mouse (works from the Mickey Kamasutra series). In the case of Sochransky, these are monsters from fantasy, horror films, anime and game worlds. Their forms, cast in bronze, promise the birth of a new created chthonic, as if we mixed the works of Hans Arp and Henry Moore with the biomechanics of the fantastic realism of Hans Rudi Giger.

In The Fountain Model, Leonid Sokhransky directly connects the handicraft production of tourist consumer goods with the traumas of the post-Soviet myth of “friendship of peoples”. The more zeal official politicians have to reconstruct the ideology, style, rhetoric of the USSR, the more obvious and inevitable is the fake, simulative essence of this state order.

In Vitas Stasiunas, creatures grow on window sills, radio points, furniture of old Moscow studio apartments, similar to the same “Bronnaya, 10”. Construction waste is turning into a landscape of microdistricts. Broken glass - in the frame of a graphic landscape, made in a silhouette manner. And honey mushrooms grow in heaps, humble indices of edible planetary dirt. Like the Kuryokhin fly agaric, Stasyunas’ mushrooms became an honest witness of the new processes of the Anthropocene in a single community, in a summer cottage, in an apartment.

The created world of "Bronnoy, 10" is simple and honest. Simultaneously whimsical and elegant. He does not impose anything on anyone, he reduces all the dregs of high-browed philosophies to an elementary sign-index. However, when sorting through these indices, no one is forbidden to come up with their own beautiful puzzle or play an imaginary chess game with the artist.

Sergei Khachaturov

Alexander Kosolapov (b. 1943, Moscow) is an artist, painter, graphic artist, sculptor, one of the key figures of Sots Art. He studied at the Moscow Art School at the Art Institute. V. I. Surikov and the Moscow Higher School of Industrial Art. In 1975 he emigrated to the USA. Lives and works in New York. The works are based on an ironically radical combination of recognizable symbols and stereotypes of Soviet ideology and global mass culture. Playing with images, the artist debunks both Soviet political myth-making and capitalist commodity fetishism. Works in the collections of MOMA New York, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and many others.

Leonid Sokhransky (b. 1971, Moscow) - artist, sculptor, studied at the Stroganov School, then at the School of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Moscow. In the early 2000s, he created projects of obviously unfeasible monuments for places where they would never have been agreed to be erected. Sokhransky prefers the creation of spatial works - sculpture, objects and installations. These are fantasies-reflections on a philosophical, literary and historical theme. Works in the collection of the State Museum of Applied Arts, Smederevo, Serbia.

Vitas Stasyunas (b. 1958, Tilt) – artist, sculptor. He studied at the courses of stone carving masters at the Moscow State Art and Industry Academy named after S. G. Stroganov in 1981-1983. Since 1993, a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, sculpture section. Lives and works in Moscow. She uses collage and assemblage techniques on canvas. The inspiration for him is the absurdity that surrounds a person. The creative path began with an appeal to the traditions of Sots Art, later he took up an ironic rethinking of reality through recognizable Soviet and modern images of mass culture. Works in the collections of: State Russian Museum, Tretyakov Gallery, Multimedia Art Museum, Morth Carolina Museum of Art, Perm Museum of Modern Art, Krasnoyarsk Museum of Modern Art, etc.