🗓️December 5-17, 2014
LUDA GALLERY
📍42 Mokhovaya St, St Petersburg 191028 Russia
📞 +7 999 034 60 99 | +7 911 968 64 84
◆St Petersburg Arts Project Presents The Exhibition “Khorosho. New Art of Omsk”◆
🎨Artists: * Maria Alexandrova * Alexander Belousov * Renat Latyshev * Pavla Markova * Nikita Pozdnyakov * Anna Tereshkina
Showing little-known artists from Omsk in St. Petersburg is, on the one hand, a step toward the decentralization of Russia’s art world, and on the other—a routine colonial gesture. But it is precisely this contradiction that fuels our desire to exhibit and observe, to see what may come of it.
All of these artists have worked—and continue to work—far outside the official profession of “contemporary artist” (in reality: manager, funeral goods salesperson, teacher, passport photo booth photographer, etc.). They’ve long since given up on the commercial possibilities of art, grown disillusioned with institutional support, and yet continue to make what they make. This presents the viewer with an idealized figure of the superhuman, the ascetic artist molding miracles out of bread crumbs. But this exhibition in St. Petersburg finally offers an opportunity to move beyond that tired image.
The title “KHOROSHO” (“GOOD”) unexpectedly aligned with the name of an album by Grazhdanskaya Oborona (“Civil Defense”), revealing the common root we’ve been treading upon—one we’re trying to cut off (“If you meet the Buddha—kill the Buddha”), but one that continues to nourish us.
— Anna Tereshkina
The title of the exhibition, “KHOROSHO”, echoes like a poem by Mayakovsky. The artists are united by a kind of negative discourse—it feels painfully good. A collective, sadomasochistic moan resounds: “Good!”—muddy roads, hawthorn tincture—“hurt me more!” Mayakovsky’s poem, written for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, marked the birth of a new ideology. Today, a generation has emerged from its ruins. It sees what it sees and sings its own homeland, its own republic.
— Pyotr Bely