Андрей Гросицкий. Голубая стена, 1991. Фанера, масло, коллаж Андрей Гросицкий. Карнавал. 1976. Фанера, масло Андрей Гросицкий. Ликующие краски. 2014. Картон, масло, смешанная техника Андрей Гросицкий. Трапеза. 2016. Картон, масло, смешанная техника

Curated by: Sergey Khachaturov
Architect: Vlad Ogai

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents Objectivity, an exhibition of Andrey Grositsky. Numerous works from different collections (not only paintings, but also graphics and objects that inspired the artist) are brought together under one curatorial idea of Sergey Khachaturov: to show the art of Andrey Grositsky in different complex contexts, from a dialogue with contemporaries to a premonition of ideas inherent in the metalanguage of present day millennials.

Andreiy Grositsky is a contemporary Russian artist whose work is genetically related to Russian non-conformism or ’other art’. Today he is perceived as one of the leading artists who conceptualized pictorial plasticity in his works. Grositsky is commonly referred to as one of the founders of the Russian ‘pop art’.

The exhibition is located on the third floor of the main building of the Museum on Petrovka 25 and includes more than 120 works. The first two rooms introduce the viewer to Grositsky’s key works, in which household items, pieces of rusty metal, keys, and locks transcend the usual format of the canvas. The most ordinary things in his paintings live in immense space and aspire to become sculptures, they look as if cramped in a closed frame. Cosmic Artisan, a large-scale installation by Vlad Ogai anchors the space.

The exposition in Room 3 is concerned with the three main issues raised in a dialogue between Grositsky and his contemporaries. Template, the first theme deals with reproduction, typicality and uniqueness represented in a painting or a sculptural object. It is also reminiscent of Italian arte povera, referring to the silent voice of utterly routine, trite conveyor belt objects and cliched forms. Here Grositsky polemithises with Ivan Chuikov, Yuri Zlotnikov and Igor Shelkovsky. Sarcasm (‘to tear flesh’ in Greek), the second theme, is related to social bias in art. Here Boris Orlov and Viktor Pivovarov can be viewed as Grositsky’s interlocutors. The third theme is Brutalism, which testifies to the utmost importance attached by Grositsky and his contemporaries to the honesty of structure, form and material. Asceticism and simplicity, rudeness and dullness of the portraits of objects allow to relate the paintings of Roginsky, Krasnopevetsev, and Turetsky to the style of Neo-brutalism which emerged during the Second wave of Modernism (1950s — 1980s). It is with this strand of art that Andrey Grositsky is juxtaposed here.

The three themes are further developed in the following part of the exhibition when Grositsky’s art is considered as opposed to the new generation of artists — Alexander Golynsky, Artem Filatov, Vilaly Bezpalov, Vladimir Potapov, Alexander Tsikarishvili, Vladimir Chernyshev and Nestor Engelke.

A significant part of the exhibition was compiled from the collection of Anton and Natalia Grositsky. In addition to works from the MMOMA collection, the project will also feature works by Grositsky from the collection of the New Jerusalem International Art Center, ARTSTORY Gallery, OVCHARENKO Gallery, the private collection of Alexander Kulachko, as well as Sergei Popov and Olya Popova (pop/off/art gallery).

About the Artist:

Andrei Grositsky is a painter who is considered to be one of the founders of the Russian ‘pop art’. He graduated from the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute (Dmitri Mochalsky’s workshop) in 1959. In 1968 Grositsky joined the Moscow Union of Artists. After a short-term fascination with Cezannism and the work of the Jack of Diamonds artists, Grositsky developed his own artistic style, based on the relationship between the space of the canvas and the object placed in it.