Tamara Shipitsina. Small Gardens

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Free Workshops School of Contemporary Art, the SOYUZ Cultural Project and the Carré d'Artistes Gallery present Tamara Shipitsina's solo exhibition Small Gardens. The exhibition is held as part of the MMOMA Young Art Support Programme.

Tamara Shipitsina is a professional architect and has been actively engaged in printmaking for the past ten years. Using an etching machine assembled after her own drawings, she experiments with lithography, tries different materials and approaches and fuses printing with other techniques to create unique installations. Tatiana believes that this ancient artistic method has a huge potential, and this medium can and should be used to talk about contemporaneity.

The exhibition features Shipitsina's works exploring common post-Soviet landscapes. Public spaces impact the whole society, safely preserve visual images that were imprinted on us back in childhood and are often passed on from generation to generation. A characteristic feature of these landscapes are gardens planted on small plots of land in front of multi-storey residential buildings. In high-rise districts of post- Soviet Russia, these small gardens often beautify standard housing. A distinctive feature of these spaces are unique fences of all kinds and shapes, often made of pennant strings or pieces of old furniture, that protect the flowerbeds.

The exhibition will focus on the Everyday Life Patterns series that explores archetypal everyday images of a prefabricated housing district. Each image was constructed by merging drawings, nature shots and photographs from the author's family archive with the technique of printmaking. Besides, the exhibition will feature sheets from the Small Garden's Flowers series, paintings, objects and the installation One Minute of Light. The project also presents works by Mikhail Roginsky, Anya Zhelud and Ilya Kabakov from the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

About the artist

Tamara Shipitsina was born in 1993 in Volgograd. She got a degree in residential architecture. She is co-founder of Re-pei, a self-organization of Volgograd artists. She took part in the following exhibitions: Workshop’17. Over There, Where No One Dreams: from Sacred Geography to Non-Place; Workshop’19. Dysmorphophobia; You'll Find Me (Krasnodar) and Archstoyanie 2018. Co-Creation. Tatiana's solo exhibitions were held in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, she also took part in the First Biennale of Difficult Heritage (Volgograd, 2021)

About the gallery

The Carré d’Artistes Gallery’s mission is to help transcend borders and local barriers. Over the years, the gallery has discovered a whole generation of talented artists in Russian regions and introduced their work to a wide audience. This year, the gallery's owner Yulia Akimova has created a new institution: the SOYUZ Cultural Project. SOYUZ will engage independent curators to regularly present the artists’ works at external sites: at the venues of museums and large foundations.

About the School

The School of Contemporary Art Free Workshops is an educational platform of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for young artists and curators. It was founded in 1992 by a group of artists and art historians, including Alexander Ponomarev, Vladimir Kupriyanov, Vladimir Nasedkin, and Moscow State University professors Vera Dazhina and Valery Turchin. The students attend workshops of the best speakers, successful cultural leaders, well-known philosophers, and theorists of contemporary art. Through the educational programme, young artists and curators immerse themselves in the art world, participate in workshops, group exhibitions and festivals. Being a part of the Museum, Free Workshops offer their audience a unique opportunity to study theoretical and practical aspects of contemporary art while being in its epicentre. At every stage of their journey the artists are supported by the Museum and the School. They are encouraged to take part in group exhibitions (annual exhibitions of young art, group projects by young curators) and to have solo exhibitions (MMOMA Young Art Support Programme).