Evgeny Gorokhovsky. Between the Concrete and the Infinite

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the pop/off/art gallery, presents a retrospective exhibition, "Between the Concrete and the Infinite," dedicated to the work of Evgeny Gorokhovsky. This artist, a leading exponent of photo- and hyperrealism, masterfully combines photographic precision, philosophical depth, and painterly freedom.

Evgeny Gorokhovsky, son of the renowned unofficial artist Eduard Gorokhovsky, creator of the famous photograms, developed his own unique style. His works, created on the border between photography and painting, are complex compositions where reality is intertwined with ornamental elements, philosophical allusions, and references to the art of past eras. For Evgeny, photography was not an end goal, but the beginning of a journey, allowing him to transform a moment into a reflection on time, memory, and presence.

The exhibition features over 70 works, including pieces from 15 Russian museum and private collections. These include the State Tretyakov Gallery, the New Aslan Chekhoev Museum, the V. I. Dahl Museum of Literature, and the collections of Yevgeny Nutovich and Yevgeny Khamin. The exhibition is organized as a retrospective and includes paintings and graphic works, archival materials, and the artist’s personal belongings preserved in his family.

The exhibition consists of several thematic sections, covering various stages of Yevgeny Gorokhovsky’s creative career. Visitors will be able to see works created for the theater, landscape series including celestial studies, as well as works dedicated to the study of Eastern culture, female identity, and the theme of ornament.

Evgeny Eduardovich Gorokhovsky (1951–2021) was born in Odessa to Eduard Gorokhovsky, an architect and later one of the most prominent Russian artists of the second half of the century. In 1973, he graduated from the production department of the Moscow Art Theatre School and worked in his field in Novosibirsk, where he spent his early years. His artistic development took place in the 1970s, surrounded by the masters of the "other art" movement — Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, and Erik Bulatov. It was then that his distinctive style developed, merging photorealistic representation with metaphysical, conceptually reflective content. Evgeny Gorokhovsky became one of the founders of Russian photorealism (O. Kozlova, "Photorealism," Moscow, 1994), imbuing it with a distinctively philosophical dimension. The artist died on August 19, 2021.

The pop/off/art gallery was founded in 2004 in Moscow by art historian Sergei Popov. Olga Popova has been the gallery’s partner since 2011. The gallery represents Russian and European artists and participates in major contemporary art fairs in Russia and Europe. The gallery has organized several dozen museum projects in Russia. Since 2011, the gallery has been located on the premises of the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art. From 2012 to 2014, a pop/off/art branch was located in Berlin. In 2023, the gallery’s second exhibition space in Moscow, pop/off/art 2.0, opened at 9 Bolshoy Palashevsky Lane.