Actual Russia:
a game of hopscotch

Organizers: Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Art and the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO. With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation

Dates: December 8, 2017 - January 21, 2018

Venue: All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art
Address: Delegatskaya St., 3

Alexey Andreev, Homeland digital paint 2017 courtesy Maltsev gallery

The Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Art and the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO present the Actual Russia project, an annual collective exhibition of the main trends of contemporary art in the country, which continues the Always Modern series, combining the work of artists of different generations and showing not so much the difference between them, how much continuity of art eras.

Significant works and new works of contemporary artists from St. Petersburg to Yakutsk are combined into a large-scale exhibition “Actual Russia” following the results of 2017.

V. Migachev. Against the light. 2016 h.sm.t. 140x170 courtesy gallery Art Story

More than 50 authors existing in art in parallel and independently from each other, more than a hundred works - from abstract installations to classical examples of academic painting. The experiments of digital artists are adjacent to the works of academicians of painting and stars of the Russian art scene.

The dialogue of the premiere works of honored masters - President of the Russian Academy of Arts Zurab Tsereteli and nonconformist Oscar Rabin sets the tone for the entire exposition, freeing authors from genre, stylistic and ideological confrontation.

Vadim Grigoryev-Bashun. Fight. oil on canvas 2017

The works of Vasily Shulzhenko and Igor Pestov, Diana Vouba and Yegor Plotnikov, Andrei Lublinsky and Julia Malinina, Mikhail Rozanov and Damir Muratov offer the viewer to rethink the meaning of the term “classic” in the context of contemporary art.

Interventions by new media in the field of traditional visuals, a combination of current trends with old-school painting, the "classical" ambitions of novice authors and radical experiments by experienced artists form the overall picture of contemporary Russian art in the past year.

Damur Muratov. Canvas, oil. Courtesy 11.12 GALLERY

At the exhibition, for the first time in real space, an exposition of digital painting by the Maltsev Gallery project by journalist Igor Maltsev will be presented.

The curators of the exhibition intentionally do not divide “Actual Russia” into thematic and genre blocks, showing the work of artists of different stylistic directions as a single, albeit heterogeneous alloy.

Diana Wouba, Manuscript, 2017

About the Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Art

Fed is a non-profit organization specializing in relevant research and projects in the field of contemporary culture, art, cinematography, literature and folk art. The mission of the fund is to improve the quality of cultural policy in public life through research, analysis and forecasting, projects and activities. The Federal Reserve Institute implements independent scientific, research and cultural projects, establishes additional scholarships, grants and awards on its own behalf, and conducts publishing and educational activities.

About ROSIZO

The State Museum and Exhibition Center "ROSIZO" was founded in 1959. On November 1, 2016, the State Center for Contemporary Art became part of ROSIZO. Today, ROSIZO is an extensive federal museum with a network in nine constituent entities of the Russian Federation and plays an important role in the process of integrating Russian art into the international context. This is a multidisciplinary institution that develops and implements exhibition and cultural and educational projects around the world. The ROSIZO Foundation has more than 45,000 storage units. One of the main tasks of ROSIZO is to popularize the artistic heritage of Russia and the latest Russian art.

About VMDPNI

The All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied and Folk Art is the only museum in Russia that has combined the works of decorative and applied art of Russia from the 18th-20th centuries in its collection. The museum’s collection was formed by 1999 as a result of the union of the collections of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art, founded in 1981, and the Museum of Folk Art named after S.T. Morozov (former Handicraft Museum, founded in 1885), as well as library and archival funds of the Research Institute of the art industry. Private collections are also stored in the museum’s funds: a collection of art metal donated by its collector G. A. Kubryakov, the famous collection of Russian, Eastern and European fabrics N. L. Shabelskaya, donated by a French citizen P. M. Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, porcelain collections collected by M.V. Mironova and A.S. Menaker.