A project for ARCA. Grisha. Untitled

About the exhibition

You are an observer who can always encounter the world of the imaginary. Imagine that, as if in a fairy tale, you have discovered a gate closed with a big lock. But you cannot open the doors, because both the gate and the lock are just a fiction, an image applied to a real obstacle. You can either do nothing or try to erase, paint over the picture, add your own fantasies. Anyway your actions will not change the physical barrier. The boundary between the dreamlike and the material is erased. The drawing affects the viewer only if it attracts, delights, angers or drives to despair, in a word, if it reflects your inner feelings at this particular moment. The image of a locked gate is a symbolic archetype, a conjunction of a real object and an illusion. However, whereas the former remains, the drawing will soon be painted over and disappear forever from the face of the city.

About the artist

Grisha was born in 1989 in Khimki, Moscow Region. He graduated from the Moscow State Art and Cultural University, majoring in advertising. He has been doing street art since 2004. He works with the street artist 0331c. As part of the 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017), MMOMA together with the Ruarts Foundation hosted Soot, a joint exhibition of Grisha and 0331c. In 2018, the artist participated in Alexei Partol’s exhibition Parts of the Walls at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall (St. Petersburg). Besides creating graffiti and small scale granite sculptures, Grisha works as a graphic artist. Many of his works are made with an ordinary gel pen. Monochrome and ‘prickly’ hatching as if sprouting from paper, detailing strikes with precision and meticulousness.

In 2019, Grisha, together with 0331c and Alexei Partola, travelled down into an abandoned part of the Paris catacombs. In 2021, the Ruarts Foundation hosted an exhibition of photographic documentation of this journey and published the book City from the Underground. In 2022, the Ruarts Gallery hosted the first solo exhibition of Grisha’s works in the concept of Horror vacui, titled Impermissible Luxury. In April 2023 the Ruarts Foundation showed Our Stone Age, a performance by Moscow artists 0331s and Grisha about the life and fashion of people of the ‘stone future’. The authors created a collection of clothes, accessories and tableware made of crystals of different origin. The video work was included in the Ruarts Foundation collection. In 2023, the Ruarts Gallery stand was chosen as the ‘Best Stand’ at Cosmoscow, presenting a total installation. It featured a dialogue between the works of Alexei Luka and Grisha, ‘street wave’ artists exploring different artistic practices and materials.

ARCA

ARCA is a joint project of the Ruarts Foundation and MMOMA launched in the spring of 2019 as part of the first Street Art Forum, dedicated to the exploration of street art, public art, and graffiti. Every four months, new murals of different Russian street artists appear in the arch of the MMOMA Educational Center on 17 Ermolaevsky Lane (to the right of the entrance). The project has featured Ivan Nainti, Evgeny Muluk, 0331c, NOOTK, Artem Stefanov, Dmitry Aske, Alexey Partola, SY, Petro, Misha Bury, Dmitry Retro, DUSTO, among others.