Russian Contemporary Drawing. No Limits
Exhibition of Russian Contemporary Art in Berlin Runs from January 28th to March 15th 2016
February 05th, 2016Drawing. No Limits is the pilot project of the exhibition series of Russian Contemporary art. It is organized by the Russian House of Science and Culture, the Sparta agency for art trade and the Savina Gallery. The project will run from January 28th to March 15th this year at the Russisches Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur in Berlin located on Friedrichstraße.
The Russian Contemporary Project focuses on the main trends of contemporary Russian art with a focus on an international audience. The main element of the program is the integration of modern Russian art in the international art trade and to accept Russia's cultural missions abroad.
Drawing: No Limits is the first project of the exhibition series. The project goal is to connect new names with observers and present major trends in today's graphic art. Eighteen Russian artists - from newcomers to established names will have their work on display as part of this project.
Tanya Akhmetgalieva, Yury Alexandrov, Maria Arendt, Yury Avvakumov, Liza Bobkova, Kirill Chelushkin, Vladimir Grig, Ilya Grishaev, Georgy Litichevsky, Gosha Ostretsov, Sergey Pakhomov, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Andrey Rudjev, Aljona Shapovalova, Denis Shevchuk, Shishkin Hokusai, Petr Shvetsov, Haim Sokol are the artists who are presenting their work. Some of them are newcomers to the art scene and some have lived their whole lives in Russia.
Georgy Litichevsky for example has lived between Moscow and Berlin, his work is mainly illustration. He uses brightly colored panels and shows the influence of graffiti art, comics, art brut, and the Russian lubok (Russian picture book) in his pieces. As he explains, “I feel that the sphere of art is not a zone for the solution of serious problems, but a field for escaping them. Art is as necessary as sleep and recreation.” Subscribing to this as a kind of pop cultural voyeurism, his comic style work has a great variety of heroes, which he treats ironically.
Another one of the artists presenting their work at the exhibition is Vitaly Pushnitsky who is internationally recognized as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and as a creator of installations, art objects and multimedia. Today he is considered as one of Russia's leading contemporary artists.
All the artists in the exhibition are expanding the boundaries and ideas of what drawing is: the spectrum ranges from three-dimensional installations to text work of architectural forms through to the comic style. It is a special and unusual exhibition where one can expand their knowledge and views on the possibilites of drawing as an art form.
The project curator, Liza Savina says: “We want our project to demonstrate an absence of vital distinctions in the artistic process globally. The authenticity does persist on the level of text, which is anyway at least bilingual. Yet in general, in Russia, as elsewhere, the drawing breaks through the frame of an easel. It gains volume, it becomes an object, an installation, a sculpture; it displays some features of a monumental painting or even of a decorated board, and still it is a drawing”.
References and Links
Kristina Žnidarić, Berlin Global