Russian artists, an art superlative: Abbey St. Andrew, Meymac, France

It is a cluttered vision, at the same time ironic, nostalgic and disillusioned, torn between past and present, sordid reality and magnified ideal, Eternal Russia and Soviet Empire, that contemporary Russian artists project in their works. They say: the loss which is not simply that of memory, the bankruptcy of ideologies which is not only that of the Communist, the illusion and illusion of images, the chasms in which religion or history and still more the religion of history precipitates us, the impossibility of the dream and the certainty of the nightmare.

Recovering like so many tinsel the signs of what was the expression of Russian, Tsarist or Soviet greatness, accumulating references that often overlap, sometimes contradictory, mixing them with those of a contrary modernity - emanating from a West which today aspires them - these artists paint, sculpt, photograph, film or knit the grotesque images of a dilapidated world, with an outrageous earthiness, deliberately rustic, energetically popular. For the expression of an unvarnished reality always appears unseemly and vulgar alongside that of ideals. But it is also tinged with a marvelous naive, a baroque mysticism, sometimes a Chekhovian romanticism - of which we know the cynical harshness, behind the sweetness of the images and the elegance of the feelings - which push the limits of the imaginary, and which would be, sublime enjoyment, the parodic and desperate expression of the Slavic soul.

Vernissage

13. March 2010

Exhibition period

14. March – 13. June 2010

Venue

Abbaye St André - Centre d'art contemporain Meymac

2-8 Rue du Bûcher

19250 Meymac

France

Contact media: Céline Haudrechy

Artists

Yuri Avvakumov  |  Born 1957 in Tiraspol, USSR 

Katerina Belkina  |  Born 1974 in Samara, USSR

Alina & Jeff Bliumis  |  Born in USSR

Anastasia Bolchakova  |  Born 1980 in Moscow, USSR 

Leonid Borisov  |  Born 1943 in Leningrad, USSR 

Kirill Chelushkin  |  Born 1968 in Abramtsevo, USSR

Dubossarsky & Vinogradov  |  Born 1964 in Moscow, USSR

Alexei Kallima  |  Born 1969 in Grosny, USSR 

Valery Koshlyakov  |  Born 1962 in Salks, USSR 

Oleg Kulik  |  Born 1961 in Kiev, USSR 

Vladimir Logutov  |  Born 1980 in Samara, USSR 

Igor Makarevich  |  Born 1943 in Trialety, USSR 

Sergey Maximishin  |  Born 1964 in Kodyma, USSR 

Alexandra Mitlianskaya  |  Born 1958 in Moscow, USSR 

Andrei Molodkin  |  Born 1966 in Boui, USSR 

Vladimir Nasedkin  |  Born 1954 in Ivdel, USSR 

Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich  |  Born 1978 in Moscow, USSR 

PG Group  |  founded 2000

Ivan Plusch  |  Born 1981 in Leningrad, USSR

Yuri Shabelnikov  |  Born 1959 in Taganrog, USSR 

Dmitri Shorin  |  Born 1971 in Novosibirsk, USSR 

The Blue Noses  |  Group founded in 1999 in Russia

Dimitri Tsykalov  |  Born 1963 in Moscow, USSR

Alexeï Vassiliev  |  Born 1959 in Moscow, USSR 

Ira Waldron  |  Born 1957 in Leningrad, USSR 

Yevgeniy Fiks  |  Born 1972 in Moscow, USSR