"Home is his dear song about the May beetle"

The exposition "Home to his own song about the May beetle" will acquaint the public with 12 new sculptures of the artist.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the works of the German poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In the final poem of the book "Rose to Anyone" (1963) Celan refers to the famous 17th century German folk song about the May Beetle, a folk composition that combines childish naivety with unbearable grief over the loss of parents and home during a bloody war. It is this disturbing feeling, born of the paradoxical nature of the combination of naivety of form and eerie content, that finds itself in the whitish figures, frozen in small groups in the space of the exhibition.

Pankin himself calls the main source of his artistic interests "questions of the genealogy of corporeality, a long history of ideas about the body." It is curious that the artist’s wife was the model for some of the new works.

“I am worried about how the ’body’ feels today, in the face of the ’numbness’ from the simultaneous existence of everything that was in culture before. In these works, the bodily form, with the reduction and hypertrophy of ancient standards, comes into relation with stiffness, lameness, incorrect posture, dizziness, excommunication and inability to play the guitar, ”says Alexey Pankin.

In his work, the author combines an intellectual approach with a subtle, deeply individual plasticity. The artist works with a variety of materials and their unexpected combinations, while his favorite material is wood. Thanks to modern methods of wood processing, his sculptures acquire a special velvety surface, similar to the surface of human skin. Major sculptors who worked with wood - such as Sergei Konenkov, Henry Moore, Stefan Balckenhol - used dark woods, which gave the impression of something heavy. Pankin, choosing light woods and using the author’s technology of lightening wood, achieves a dramatic and disturbing image of a bloodless body.

Alexey Pankin was born in 1976 in Novomoskovsk. In 1999-2001 he studied at the Higher Courses for Directors and Screenwriters (workshop of FS Khitruk and E.V. Nazarov). In 2007-2008 he attended seminars by A. Osmolovsky. 2010-2011 - IPSI, New Artistic Strategies. Personal exhibition was held at the ART4 Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow). Participated in group exhibitions at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow) and ARTPLAY (Moscow). Lives and works in Moscow.