Black and white space in the works of 21st century artists

On April 11, on the eve of Cosmonautics Day and in the year of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Yuri Gagarin, the exhibition “Black and White Space” will open in the Khodynka Gallery of the Moscow Exhibition Halls Association.

The exhibition includes works on the theme of space, different both in semantic perception and in creative embodiment - objects, graphics and sculpture, reliefs, photographs, prints on designer clothes. Most authors have long and successfully addressed the theme of space in their work. Participants of the exhibition: Oleg Artemyev, Tatyana Badanina, Konstantin Batynkov, Alexander Dedushev, Alena Kalyanova, Boris Kocheyshvili, Ivan Mikhailov, Vladimir Nasedkin, Elena Rzhevskaya, Leonid Tishkov, Vladimir Tryamkin, Oleg Tyrkin, Sergey Chernov, Anton Chumak, Evgeny Schneider.

New works were prepared especially for the project by Ivan Mikhailov, who reflects on what space playgrounds might look like in the future (by the way, some of the images were generated by a neural network). And the artist, designer Elena Rzhevskaya, in collaboration with the Xakama brand, made clothing models for the exhibition using prints from the “Megagalaxy” series (clothing designer – Lena Makashova).

The exhibition is part of a multi-part series dedicated to the interpretation of the theme of space by authors of the current century. But for the first time, the curators of the project, which started in 2011 and was shown in completely different ways at many gallery and museum venues in Moscow and other Russian cities, made an attempt to completely limit the color of the works and present only black and white graphic works and monochrome objects.

There are two more unusual components of the project. The exhibition features black and white photographs taken in space by pilot-cosmonaut, Hero of Russia Oleg Artemyev, who has already completed three flights. And in one of the chamber halls, curators Valeria Gallay and Dmitry Butkevich posted true stories and myths about space and astronautics, including those “told” by a direct participant in those “historical everyday life” Mark Gallay, Honored Test Pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union, instructor of the first detachment cosmonauts, the author of the slogan “Let’s go!”, to whose 110th anniversary the project is dedicated.

The style of the exhibition echoes the “silent” cinema of the past. As part of the project, it is planned to show fragments of black and white films shot in the 1920-1930s, long before the start of space exploration.

The exhibition once again shows that space continues to inspire contemporary artists. A peculiar juggling of meanings and images leads to the fact that each time the result is a completely unusual, different space, giving rise to a new dialogue with the audience.