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The State Russian Museum opens "Art for Art" in the Marble Palace

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Written by Joseph Razo   
Thursday, 11 February 2010 02:53

Ilya Repin - Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870-1873 - Oil on canvas - The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, Russia - On May, 21 the State Russian Museum opened the ‘Art for Art’ exhibition in the Marble Palace. The exposition comprises more than 150 works of painterly and graphic art, installations, photos and objects from the collection of the State Russian Museum. In the 20th and 21st centuries, art images acquired creative potential similar to that of live characters and visualities -- the sources of earlier inspiration. In the epoch of Post-Modernism, it is impossible to avoid quotations and references to art history, and this is one of the major principles of contemporary art. Artists refer to the entire experience of world artistic culture, ranging from diligent apprenticeship to provocative parody. Art becomes more and more fixed upon itself and the subject of “Art for Art” gains topicality.

Braco Dimitrijevic, Croatian conceptual artist installation at The Russian MuseumFor the sake of revealing the mechanism of contemporary art the authors of the Art for Art exhibition concept have deliberately resorted to didacticism. The exhibition displays various artistic devices: compositional analysis and deconstruction, citations and appropriations, parody and burlesque, self-elimination and self-description. The exhibition built on thematic principle comprises the following sections: At the Museum, Art for Art: Close-Up, Forward/Backward to the Classics, Russian School, Avant-Garde Forever, Iconography, The Idea of Art: Concepts’ Advance and The High/The Low.

For the first time ever, such diverse artists as Andrei Mylnikov and Olga Tobreluts, Vasily Yakovlev and Alexander Kosolapov, Helium Korzhev and Claudio Bravo, prominent Pop art masters and quite young artists have grouped together within a single exhibition space. The exhibition points out the contrasts and reveals paradoxical interchanges, displays common reasons and consequences of different, at first sight, processes in contemporary art.

Art has always been in the state of permanent introspection on its system of values, its aims and means (contensive and expressive). Such self-absorption and self-inversion have shown and shows itself in various ways, functions both as engine and brakes.

Why do the artists constantly address, for instance, Ilya Repin’s well-known “Barge Haulers on the Volga”? The Russian School section of the exhibition offers different answers to this question – sculpture by Frank Williams and object by Vadim Kozin. For national and world art Russian Avant-Garde remains a permanent creative stimulant, and the Avant-Garde Forever section showing artworks by Leonid Sokov, Braco Dimitrijevic, Irina Zatulovskaya and Andrei Molodkin is devoted to this phenomenon.

The Iconography section presents interpretations of the famous canvases by Rembrandt and Giorgione, Goya and Velasquez, Monet and Ingres. The High/The Low section illustrates undying interest in significant trends of the 20th-century art: pop art, socialist art and images of low culture, kitsch and marginal motives, which penetrate into High Art.

“Art for Art” is the eternal as well as increasingly topical subject. The representation of this theme at the exhibition will be, hopefully, no less topical. We would like to tell about the mechanisms of contemporary art, to show its transmission system, wheels and gears, their idle and effective work. The Idea of Art: Concepts’ Advance section is devoted to the idea of art per se and represents works by Yury Albert, Sergei Mironenko, Leonid Borisov and Yury Alexandrov.

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