🗓️Tuesday, December 29, 2015
6:30-10:00 pm
FRANTS GALLERY SPACE
📍23-29 Rubinshteina St., Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Frants Gallery Space warmly invites you to attend the opening reception for The Color of Time by Semen Belyi, which will take place on December 29 at 6:30 PM
The artist, as a reflection of their era, retransmits the changes unfolding around them. Empathizing with their country and people, they present an aesthetic characteristic of the period they are living through, ranging from radical gestures to total introspection. This internal work gradually takes shape and form, manifesting in the external world. The Soviet Union, as a distinct system of coordinates, shaped entire generations of artists who believed in this system. However, as the reality increasingly diverged from theory, the artistic community saw a growing number of disillusioned individuals who began to divide their work into external and internal realms. Each artist chose their own path away from the proclaimed values, with the rejection of the realist school and intentionally naive drawing being among the chosen routes.
The exhibition of Semen Bely’s lithographs tells the story of a young family in the 1970s. Partly a parody of officially sanctioned narratives, this series of prints is deliberately crafted with an air of amateurishness. In contrast to the severe style, the clumsy characters do not perform heroic deeds—they simply live. The scenes are filled with intimacy and sincerity, and the works have a childlike, primitive quality in their execution. Yet, this very aesthetic, this retreat into the theme of family, mirrored the state of society on the brink of an approaching stagnation.
UPD.
As part of the closing of Semen Bely’s apartment exhibition The Color of Time, a discussion with Gleb Yershov on the topic “The Relevance of Apartment Exhibitions Today” took place on January 28, 2016, at Frants Gallery (St. Petersburg).