Art for Russia * ART4.RU * the fourth channel : art four * Russia to be noticed worldwide *

Arts-on.com in search of the special Russian Cutting Edge Art impulse.


Screenshot of the new private museum art4.ru at Moscow, its website: www.art4.ru


Already in the time of Catherine the Great the world capital Moscow bended, despite its cold, continental climate and its strange rituals of the Czar empire and the eastern church, suddenly its wings of modernity and distributed with the Moral Weeklies in the whole land art and culture, supported and improved the scholarship of the scholars and encouraged initiatives against the still self-evident analphabetism. Then, a revolution, in a way successful, born out of furious distress, whose product had to fail - letting unconsidered all his structural faults - just because of its geo-climatical unrulable land. Und now, after the calm down of a diversification into different, cooperating countries and the establishment of a quite hipp capitalism with a great emphasis on international showing, after becoming integrated in the centres of english glamour, Russia, especially Moscow, presents itself with language-related neighbours, money and joie de vivre like an Oxford-Graduate, who had studied languages and was a little bit busy in international affairs or secret services, and now likes to celebrates his life as a man of independent means.


Well, what about a museum, for instance, for contemporary art, to collect the cherries on the cake and to simplify the overview of the russian art-scene for the incoming stream of tourists?

art4.ru – its name especially fitting the webneeds, merging with the russian „ru“ address to „art for russia“ - art4.ru – is exactly this. Even the far away lightning lights the insight, because art4.ru is quite concerned with the web: the collection can be overviewed with at least one art-object up to all collected ones for every artist, and soon after the museum's website- foundation in 2005 a virtual exhibition of contemporary russian art in 30 pieces was shown via the web to the world. In addition, all important events can be looked up at the frontpage, although the far away, not russian speaking artsearcher has to be content with the rudiments of english the usual translation programmes in the web offers or with the progamm up to the end of 2007, that has already been translated by the art4.ru curators or webmasters. Additionally, most of the linked galleries have english versions. The english "Channel Four", famous for the innovative style of its tv-logo, the cipher "4", may have been involved in naming as a special ideal to be outmatched by the web's *four*, too. (As we've already alluded to Bond, it's now Holmes and Doyle's Sign of the Four...)


Well, what we snapped out of it, from 2006 up to now: 14.08.2006 a strange exhibition with the subject death, destruction, destroyed, 40 artists from 24 countries. Some of them were just rude with the subject, others catched the double-bind between the beautiful surface and the critical impulse of horror. Unfortunately the artists have to be researched on other websites or recognized in the long tour of getting knowledge reading and sightseeing the whole art4.ru online catalogue. We've partially succeeded in it meanwhile, thus are able to identify Ilya Kabakov and Arzamasova-Evzovich-Svyatsky-Fridkes from the famous AES + F Gallery.




The first installation shows a quite fairy-like woman with an iron leg, a bar used in case of infantile paralysis, the name of this disease (*infantile paralysis*) a kind of content description of the art-object - "snow white and the seven dwarfs", for instance, who is sleeping while they are running around and waiting for some pleasure after *motherhood in deef & blindness* (as a dish). Next to it, a boy in the position of a hero, in the background scenes of private wars acted out with baseball batters. At the right, a small sculpture visualizing the contrary of the proverb „getting the child out of the standpipe“ and alluding to the whole semantical group of such contents („to pour out the child with the bath“ a.s.o.)

The rude objects: for instance a just dead and before lively horse; worms and insects in flesh a.s.o.

In September 2006 an exhibition about art in the Ukraine, wonderful postmodern art-works, merging themselves nearly loudly into the international art-scene. Some pieces a kind of prospect of the southern german and austrian exhibitions of 2007-2008:


At the front from left to right Gilbert & George, Eva&Adele, Marcel Duchamp; in the background or at the table Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and all the others *you know*



Else in 2007: the second Biennale of Contemporary Russian Art, its motto „Believe“. We snapped an installation reminiscent to picture traditions of religion but retelling this in the less admired semantical field of sexual instincts. Wonderful work, like the ones in the death & destruction exhibition, clear and readable, but showing new and critical aspects of their subject – that has formal aspects, too, like the tradition of functional installations and religious liturgy, that is in a way an art of staging, on the wider sense, of symbols.







In the Federation Tower Travel - Project examples for variants of „socialist realism“, who along with their artificial colour and authenticism become surreal. With Dmitry Tsvetkov, who had an exhibition at the art4.ru some month later, an artist was shown, who works and copes with old symbols and the way to wear them, too. Some signs, sometimes arrows, likewise indicating ways for an army, sometimes small animals and the signs far away of political allusions, are distributed on large carpets out of wool or linen, however, materials that remind clothes, thus quite specific and unusual for international art, beyond the maled main stream.

Likewise enchained is Dmitry Kavarga in „Biomorfny Radikal“, with biomophical „abstract“ forms beyond the traditions of geometry, contour or content, and Kirill Chelushkin, who combines architectural sketches with sexual scenes to quite funny and absurd pictures, a lot of them drawings.

In 2008, he had an solo exhibition MARTION MISSION EROTICS at the Gallery Pop / off / art , where strange forms were exhibited in various media: a kind of white rubber-latex-polypropylaen with tattered borders, worked into mechanical machines-sculptures like into needles and screws, sometimes combined with radiographic-like pictures of the inner body. Otherwise, natural form, espcially microscopic structures, are usually not scattered but smooth, round and more or less closed. Fluids are, especially in close ups, far more like the biomorphic structures of the Martion Mission. Erotics. Thus, it's perhaps like sperm, exploding through space, exploring.... funny pseudo-scientifics just male-fantasies and some mythology (Hera's sour milk to compare with Herkules'first sperm explosions...) Then, one has to think of ecdysis and the fabrication of sexdolls, body and material becoming formless and getting into new forms, presented as beautiful biomorphism...well...quite funny and strange again. A conscious reflection by the artist, concerning our culture and its *erotics*?


Dmitry Gutov is aesthetically more mainstreamed, but his contents and the detailed aspects of his work are judged (seems, correctly) as criticism of western culture. His „fence“ has already be presented at the documenta 2007. The palimpsest-like structure of this artpiece, an installation, shows typical east-european's, marxist's and asian author's scriptures in the fence, in a way a reminding monument of these theories and thoughts, that are, as individual (scripture !) utterances and products of humans, – something completely different to the fallen, state-imposed wall.


The festival for young artists showed a highly heterogenous collection of approaches to the subject „space“. Again, a lot of work combines something very rude with stylishness, normality or even beauty. The most interesting piece, an installation, was perhaps the one on the photo shown here, that lifted cages with puppets, only alluding to chickens and hens, but more abstract, a little bit sweet and soft *toyish*. Wires reached across the insides of the cages, limiting the already small space further. These wires give still on the photographies the impressions of pencil drawings, thus, show the virtuality of the installation, to let the spectator him- or herself claim the thruthness of the installation as statement about reality. Such, again, art with new forms and formal ideals to tell something quite clearly. It is evident, that the contemporary art in Russia don't cares too much about the semantic approach of socialist realisms but keeps it in completely different languages of art.




On the 9th of september 2007 the nice idea to sell digital reproductions of the museum's masterpieces to everybody for very low prices, about three dollar per piece, emerged. The museum announces this idea explicitly as approach to give art to the poor and get it into the living rooms. Very nice, because of its unselfishness – you do not have to become a statistical number in the lists of visitors first, but you're object of care and art education even if you do not confirm the necessity of the meeting place *museum*.


Still last year, one of the artists that have been bought by the museum in the last month, Igor Shelkovsky, who creates in the tradition of Russian constructivism small objects like technical workparts, plates for screws or covers for screwed parts of machines. These ficticious workparts come along in unified colours on plates, and are assembled with small drawings of them, a kind of strange industrial realism or „Neue Sachlichkeit“, sheer functionalism beyond functionality, in a way, absurd, but interesting as a way of showing art within or without the Danto-ic transfiguration? Without glamourization at least. Igor Shelkovsky exhibited his artworks already in 2000 in Vienna in the exhibition „Kunst im Untergrund - Nonkonformisten aus Russland („Underground–Art - Non-Conformists from Russia“). For art4.ru, he is a new acquisition, despite of continuous reports and parttaking in his exhibitions.


The art4.ru frontpage lists two famous galleries with their projects, anyway well known from international exhibitions, for instance from FRIEZE: this is, the AES + F and the XL Gallery.

AES + F had a great collection exhibition of Arzamasova-Evzovich-Svyatsky-Fridkes, who worked out the idea of war emphasis, islamism and children's culture of fashion and games in western media. (The baseball-fashion to see above.)


The XL Gallery was present at FRIEZE and exhibited in 21.02.2008:

"Recycle" Andrei Blokhin und George Kuznetsova, who handle objects and strategies of „inner security“ and biometrics in strange installations, and showed, for example, blood collections on a wall - like the wailing wall? - other bodyforms in medical or biometrical perspective. Although an XL-artist with international experience, Ivan Chuicov, born 1953, does not really reach this quality or richness of artwork. A lot of works of Chuicov can be viewed in the virtual gallery of the art4.ru. As with Shelkovsky, perhaps the history of this artist as underground-representative is the reason for his high representation in the museum. His objects, for instance the three-dimensional object-pictures „Windows“ are understood as signs of the wish to create a better and more liberal situation in daily life and for all.


Very interesting, because heterogenous, is Dimitry Gutov(a), who is collected with a lot of pieces in the art4.ru, and had a lot of exhibitions in Russia and elsewhere. His website shows himself as productive as if he died the next day: www.gutov.ru

In the art4.ru collection, he is present with quite nostalgic still life paintings, onion and wild onion and other classical things of daily life and the quiet life of art. In april 2008, he showed new works at Gallery M & YU Gelman. These were installations of old fashioned objects in wire fences, the fences building a kind of abstract grid, forcing the daily objects to be seen as abstract forms, too. It has a touch of handling a specific background of everyday aesthetics, and is more than interesting if you compare, for instance, the prospect Martin Parr, as English photographer, gives from Russia with his pictures of the millionair's fair, and the one the more remindful art scene in Russia itself shows. Else the other projects and series, Gutov shows on his website, are in a way documents of the grotesque of the real, but not in its glamourized version – thus, not tranfigured :) - but as just enjoying the own absurdity and taking art-like power out of this. This is something really funny and perhaps as well actual resp. „cutting edge“ as international in contemporary art: To be grotesque or nearly completely crazy – just think about the strange poses Sarah Jones's models grasp. Perhaps this is favoured by Frieze and founded in the tradition of english eccentricity? (Soccer picture form Dmitry Gutov's website)


In the art4.ru collection and the Gallery M & YU Gelman you'll find too Alexei Kallima, who is known for handling the political and semantical subjects of the Tschechenie-war with traditional techniques.





But the collection shows completely different works, with some pieces nearly belonging to the „tradition“of Abstract Expressionism and its ambigious&abstract references to the spanish civil war, like Motherwells „elegy on the spanish republic“ from 1948 to 1991; and others, more postmodern and more reminiscent of an art style showing a consciousness of male or male & homosexual metropolitans, a mixture of Clemente, Salomé and Immendorf, just not too simply to be understood in the context of Tschechenien - ( a not even golden helmet won't be enough).

Nevertheless – or because of this – as you like – he is one of the very interesting artists, without any strange individual stylistic concept, nearly painting around on high levels, diversified.


.

A female artist of the ART4.RU collection is Natalija Nesterova, like Gutov in a way in a tradition of absurdity and, like Kallima, connecting to postmodernity – even if to the italian artist Chia and the tradition of the ten's and twenties' – especially Otto Dix and Conrad Felixmüller (for example, his selfportrait with sons, taken from the website www.musee-imaginaire.de (used here for journalistic and nearly scientific reasons) – it shows typical brave, bright and fleshy (pastos) lines and contours, a simplified realism like dictated by chance, sunday painted surrealism: Women from behind with big fishes as heads, pianists caught and handicapped by score papers and other strange sceneries. In some pieces, like „Red Interieur“ or „Reflection“ the sceneries are complex tales of mirrowing and assembling people and what happends to them in rooms, space and the artifical flatness of pictures. Thus, grown.


To get this article into the web, we are freaky enough to copy the individual artist-related current events listed on the art4.ru website and to tell our readers something about the artists, if, and with what kind of art-works they are collected at art4.ru.


09/25/2008 | Nikita Alexeev "It is. It does not work. That is."

23th september - 30th october

GMG Gallery

Some very lightly drawn drawings are collected at art4.ru, a series titled „death drawing“ made in 2003. Alexeev uses words to evolve contrasts and supportives for his pictorial signs and figures, sometimes quite comic-like, all of them quite „young“, even using lovely small dogs, nearly duplicated, as motives ( especially the author won't complain about that!). Graphics's tradition of advertisement and poster shines through. The gallery's exhibition is shown in the web, too, and (again) completely different, impartial in the way different media, stylistic references and disciplines are mixed up and alluded to. Always the West European and American tradition of modernity pulls out as source of handling the media, as in a black picture, letting imagine a landscape like Böcklin's and showing just – despite a white half-circle – a deep black flatness like Ad Reinhardt. This picture is heated (? not metaphorical) up or in another way connected to a machine working on it or at least physically connected to it. As meta-art metaphor: The machine of black squares is still working? - this quite obvious as conceptual content the picture-object-installation, we are invited to think.













19.09.2008 |Electroboutique, Kreta-Pop | Electroboutique, Vladislav Efimov, Aristarchus Chernyshev, Alexei Shulgin

Alexei Shulgin is collected with a strange piece, a classical etching in any way (still to understand) changed ? Or not even changed? by the 1963-born artist. He is quite busy and known as internet artist and member of the group „electroboutique“, working on classical and new media subjects like „tv“ and its forms, the op-artsy forms of the geometry-game-cube, („Black rubric's cube“), the „Nirvana's transitions“ of op-artistic pictures, and the old material qualities of film. Electroboutique combines a new, *medimaniatrical* view with a kind of analysis of – again ! - the American art tradition, like optricians strolling through the Ludwig Museum in Cologne...because they tried to keep their copyrights, we had to screenshoot them, to get our readers convinced of our similars and comparisons...



Next is Wim !

17 Ermolaevsky Lane, 19th September to 19th October 2008

Wim Delvoye. New Works

He isn't a Russian, but the Belgian artist with the tattooed pigs and inner regions of the body, taken into the outside....presented by the Gallery Diehl, which is the central place of contemporary Russian art in Berlin, Germany, but for this time exhibiting in Moskow.

Diehl + Gallery One, 5/13 Moskow, Smolenskaja Nab., 5 / 13

Two further artists with artpieces in the art4.ru collection and a current exhibition are Ilya and Emilia Kabakov:

16.09.2008 Ilya und Emilia Kabakov "Gates", Puschkin-Museum der Schönen Künste, Volkhonka, d.14, 5. entrance, 16th september to 19th of october 2008


These subtile miniature sculptures have sometimes strange narrations, like in the death & destruction exhibition we presented in the beginning of this article (Two men holding a child on the top of a source). Strange and very individual works to like, this example collected (some more pieces in the collection to be viewed by the reader him- or herself: http://www.art4.ru/ru/artists/detail.php)


At last, 15.09.2008 Galina Emelina | STOLIKI, Galerie Fine Art

11.09-09.10.2008 B. Sadovaya 3, 10, showing paintings of cut chairs in motions, again crazyness of figuration and position, but not people, but objects, to get simple painting into the groove.... still to be collected.


And now, all the art4.ru artists mentioned, and not mentioned, to be viewed by our readers, this is the link to pull you through the collection and its very viewable webgallery: www.art4.ru/ru/collection/ Just translate it with any web-machine.


We too, will keep you informed in versions in a plenty of languages.


Report: Dr. U. Ritter

Photos: By the artists, galleries and art4.ru (otherwise mentioned).