Curated by: Anna Harutyunyan, Andrey Egorov

Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) presents Where the Heart Is, a solo exhibition by Andrey (Dudya) Sarabyanov. The artist’s works revitalize the traditions of the Moscow school of painting and attract the viewer with openness and spontaneity of feeling, so rare nowadays. Sarabyanov’s first large-scale museum project will unfold in the spacious enfilade of the building on Gogolevsky Boulevard, offering two intersecting perspectives at once.
The exhibition will offer a retrospective demonstration of Sarabyanov’s major pictorial and graphic series created over the past ten-plus years. From ‘diary-like’ natural landscapes of the harsh north of Russia to colorful sketches of Uzbekistan, from semi-abstract urban views of Moscow to introspective scenes in the rooms, from a gallery of spontaneously gouache-sculpted female faces of friends and acquaintances, to chamber-like digital portraits of adolescent daughters, full of touching warmth, swept up in mundane studies during the lockdown of 2020. In all these diverse series the artist, a successor of a well-known artistic dynasty, appears as an attentive and interested observer of life, able to see the beauty and significance in its most mundane and unremarkable course.

However, it is Power, a major series of works, that anchors the exhibition as one of Sarabyanov’s most interesting and unexpected artistic expressions at the moment. The artist began this work in 2015 under the impression of a trip to Mount Athos. Observing the life of the monks, the strict guardians of the Orthodox stronghold, he created works in a variety of techniques and formats with characteristically laconic male figures in long robes. Among them, first of all, are monumental silhouettes on paper scrolls, which are reminiscent of temple frescoes and oriental calligraphy, as well as colored compositions on icon boards, monochrome paintings, miniature oriental sculptures and original ceramics.
Scattered throughout the exhibition, charismatic and enigmatic images of ascetics, frozen in energetic poses, will accompany the viewer from the beginning to the end of the journey. Combining unperturbed detachment and almost choreographed, ritualistic plasticity, universally understood the mystical depth and affirmative vitality, they all become signs of the inseparable work of body, mind and spirit striving for the Absolute. At the MMOMA exhibition, the works of the cycle will be supplemented by new graphic sheets and a wall painting the artist created for this exhibition, something of a meditative panorama of the ‘mountains and waters’ of the Aegean coast.
In his museum project Sarabyanov in an intuitive and emotional way, juxtaposes the dualistic coordinates of North and South, male and female, family and public, worldly and spiritual, and finally, the momentary and eternal in search of a single point of reference, a source of strength for life in the modern world. Letting the viewer into his inner circle, into his private microcosm, introducing him to critical experiences, important places and people, the artist, without hesitation, gives the answer to the existential question: one can find power only in love.

About the artist:
Andrey (Dudya) Sarabyanov was born in 1980 in Moscow in the family of art critics and artists Sarabyanov and Bruni. He studied at Krasnopresnenskaya art school (1992), the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum. He graduated from the N.v. Tomsky Moscow Academic Art Lyceum (1999) and the Faculty of Set Design at the Russian Academy of Theatrical Art (2004), with Sergey Barkhin, Natalia Nesterova and Yevgeny Vakhtangov as his teachers. Since the early 2020s, he has worked extensively as a set designer for films (Vertinsky, Carpenter, The Winter Time and other films). He has participated in multiple exhibitions in Russia and abroad.

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