ANI AND ANDREY ABAKUMOV:
SLIDING THREAD

The exhibition "The Escaping Thread", which will be held at the ARTSTORY Gallery from September 18 to November 22, 2020, will be the first exhibition in Russia that will present the work of young Moscow artists Ani and Andrey Abakumov to the domestic public. The audience will get acquainted with an unusual technique of drawing with threads - isothread (in Western terminology "string art").

String art (string art, art-string or rope) is believed to have appeared in England, back in the 17th century. There is a version that British weavers created openwork jewelry in a similar way. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this type of creativity was also addressed, but only in the context of pedagogy and design.

Ani and Andrei Abakumov first saw this technique in black and white. And we wondered: is it possible to add color here? Nobody has tried this before. Mathematician and programmer Andrey Abakumov develops a unique mathematical algorithm, a drawing scheme, prepares a "canvas" by stuffing nails on it. And then Ani Abakumova, for hours, days, weeks in a certain sequence, layer by layer, pulls threads on the nails - this is how the image gradually appears. The richness of tonal transitions is often created by a limited number of base colors: thanks to layering, the artist’s palette expands and becomes much more complex. At this point, the modern method - the creation of a virtual algorithm - and the traditional manual labor - weaving are combined. Small round paintings take about four kilometers of threads,and for larger works - up to 20 kilometers.

As it should be in the case of novice artists, the first works of the Abakumovs were copies of works by famous masters. In particular, the British Pre-Raphaelite artists, so beloved by the authors, who, by the way, often used photographs as a preparatory stage for creating paintings. The main sources of inspiration for the Abakumovs are "Lady Lilith" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and "Dolce far niente" by John Godward. As Ani Abakumova explains: “These paintings are so emotionally filled that it is twice as interesting to draw them with threads… Since childhood, we are endlessly tormented by social obligations and internal anxiety (school, college, work, family problems, or the general situation in the world)…. When I saw the painting "Dolce far niente" ("Sweet doing nothing"), I felt this carelessness and very often returned to it,to experience this sensation for a moment. And, first of all, I wanted to create a kind of picture with a therapeutic effect. Like Matisse, who in the terrible years of the war painted flowers and joyful motives. In my understanding, art is not only a reflection of reality, but also a way to escape from it, relax, recover. "

The works of Anya and Andrey Abakumovs are not so much about female beauty as about the state of mind. When choosing a plot, artists give preference to those characters who bring emotions: calmness, love and joy. And they offer the viewer to stop, to be in the moment "here and now", forgetting about the frantic rhythm of the modern world.

The subjects presented at the ARTSTORY exhibition are based on images and stories from old photo albums of the 1910-20s. The artists found the albums in one of the European flea markets. This is what pushed them to a new stage in the development of their creative system. The authors of the "Escaping Thread" project decided to give a new breath to these images, to "revive" vintage postcard images. They have become multi-layered and complex, but have not lost their lightness and attractiveness.