FLOWER IN THE MIDDAY LANGUOR. ANASTASIA RYBAKOVA | VADIM SIDUR

About the exhibition

The Vadim Sidur Museum and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art are proud to announce the FLOWER IN THE MIDDAY LANGUOR project. The second in a series of temporary exhibitions this year, it keeps exploring the metaphorical image of a blossoming garden as a lost and found paradise. The exhibition combines graphics by contemporary artist Anastasia Rybakova with Vadim Sidur’s artworks.

The project offers a metaphorical reflection on the theme of fragility and volatility of memory, embodied through the synthesis of two expressive means. Anastasia Rybakova’s graphic sheets capture the fragile state between blossoming and disappearance, creating a space for contemplating memory as a non-static phenomenon. In her works, flowers tired of the summer heat become a multifaceted and subtle symbol of memories that change over time, disappear or acquire new meanings. At the same time, Vadim Sidur’s memorial sculptures act as material and plastic anchors of memory, becoming the bearers of an unyielding historical context in which the ephemeral and vulnerable unfold.

Once in the exhibition space, the viewer is drawn into a reflection on the contradictory nature of memory. Both its personal, intimate perception and its broad historical dimension, where the fragile and the sustainable coexist in a constant paradoxical unity.

About the artists

Vadim Sidur (1924 – 1986) was a prominent representative of Soviet unofficial art in the second half of the twentieth century. His biography is a story of a man that went through the hardships of the 1930s, evacuation, a severe injury from fighting in World War II, and subsequent rejection by the official culture community. A man who, through his dedication to the chosen path, managed to find the most accurate language for expressing the inexpressible and securing a unique place in the history of post-war art.

Vadim Sidur’s artistic legacy is diverse and includes more than five hundred sculptures and about a thousand graphic sheets; an experimental film Monument to the Modern Condition, shot in 1974; a posthumously published collection of poems The Happiest Autumn and an autobiographical novel MYTH. Monument to the Modern Condition, which he had been working on for many years, collecting memories, observations and everyday sketches. Vadim Sidur’s monumental sculptures have been installed in Russia, Germany and the USA.

Anastasia Rybakova (b. 1998, Krasnoyarsk) is a graduate of the Institute of Architecture and Design of the Siberian Federal University (2022). She lives and works in Moscow. Her main medium is pictorial graphics, while her materials are coloured pencils, watercolour and felt-tip pens. She explores the potential of fantasy and imagination, her invented worlds represent society as an empathic and sensitive space. Anastasia's practice is built around the topic of new sincerity, she has a childlike and direct perception of the world. This is why her works are populated by animate and anthropomorphic creatures: flowers, insects, vegetables, snowflakes.

VADIM SIDUR MUSEUM

In 2018, the Vadim Sidur Museum became part of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and it has grown to be much more than just a place for storing and representing the artist's legacy. Today, it is a venue that explores and develops the current cultural agenda.

The museum's collection contains more than 1,000 sculptures and graphic works by Vadim Sidur, as well as multiple archival materials. The museum works with the collection in a dynamic way through cutting-edge approaches to designing exhibitions.

The museum's collection contains Russian and foreign publications about Vadim Sidur, exhibition catalogues, research collections, fiction books illustrated by Sidur, a series of poetry collections Evenings at the Sidur Museum, as well as literature on the theory of contemporary

PROJECT PARTNER