Brutally Yours

Curators: Tatiana Volkova and Andrey Parshikov

The dichotomy of the Apollonian (beauty) and Dionysian (passion) aesthetic approaches started in the Classical period and continued throughout the history of art. Both of these traditions continue to coexist, sometimes overriding one another, sometimes hand in hand. Modern "unofficial" art in Russia was born in a political underground that determined its orientation towards the production of ideas, rather than aesthetic product. Moscow Conceptualism has proclaimed the superiority of the content over the form, and still remains the main approach in Russian art today. However, in post-perestroika, emulation of the West and further formal research, again brought to the forefront highly organized, analytical, structured art, hermetic in its essence.

Nowadays, both approaches have been utilized in the works of the last generation of contemporary Russian artists. Similar processes occur in contemporary art in the U.S., where hermetic formalism, balancing on the brink of modern design, opposed a new rethinking of “rude” art.

The project "Brutally Yours" is aimed at exploring these tendencies in contemporary Russian art. For this project it was chosen a new generation of Russian artists who permanently doesn’t work with the commercial galleries, who is mostly focused on evocative experiments, who is forming the avant-garde of the present artistic situation. Divertive, subordinated the conceptual maestriya art on the one hand, and the art of "brutal" - direct, provocative, and highly political in its nature, – on the other hand.

Brutality and hermetism, formal search and open gesture, rebelliousness and structured sabotage – these are some of the points of these two artistic methods. Their demonstration and research is a task of the new project "Brutally Yours". Two curators, reflecting the strategy of the exact route, confronted five pairs of artists to explore the latest trends of contemporary Russian art scene.

Artists:

• Dmitriy Bulnygin
• PG group
• Bombily group
• Anton Ginzburg
• Yasha Kazhdan
• Ksenia Perertuhina
• Masha Sha
• and others.