This Is the Best We Have. The Art Newspaper Russia Selection
The exhibition’s title is inspired by one of the artists featured in the show, the recently departed Valery Chtak, a prominent member of the 2000s generation. The project is based on the selected interviews from the last ten years published in The Art Newspaper Russia, one of the leading fine arts periodicals. The title emphasises the author’s role in defining the face of the contemporary artistic process. This Is the Best We Have is about artists and their works. It was not the goal to prioritise the ranks of contemporary Russian artists: the project did not include many equally important names and interesting works.
One of the main criteria of this ‘digest’ was to show authors of different generations and strategies, methods and characters, stylistic and semantic preferences. To put this exhibition together the creators selected the works discussed in the interviews, including some key works that were shown on the previous exhibitons discussed in the timely articles. The result is a diverse canvas that embraces a wide range of formats, techniques and methods of contemporary art. The project, covering a large time span from the 1960s to the 2020s, is a guided tour through the history of art. It demonstrates the influence of older masters on the contemporary scene, and shows the links traceable between works created in different years.
One of the unifying elements of the exhibition is the text, which has become an essential component of the artists’ works – both the classics of Moscow conceptualism, such as Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, Leonid Sokov, and our contemporaries – Pavel Pepperstein, Valery Chtak, Irina Korina, Alina Glazun, Aristarkh Chernyshev. Between these ‘text messages’ are visual ‘messages’ analysing various aspects of history, modernity and visions of the future.
The exhibition opens with Erik Bulatov’s painting This and That. It rhymes with the title of the project and confirms its main message. It also emphasises that the project was initiated by the newspaper dedicated to the most interesting and important events in the art world. Thus, these events were put into words and commented on. The exhibition includes selected fragments of interviews that help the viewer to understand the idea behind the project.
