Phenomena. Contemporary Moscow Painting and the Reassembly of the Real

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition "Phenomena," dedicated to the return of fundamentally classical painting to the contemporary scene, convincingly embodying the image and the spirit of modernity. While not, as was the case until recently, denying its own past and recognizing the intrinsic value of the painting and its surface, such painting is not entrenched in centuries-old tradition, but sensitively responds to the technological and existential challenges of our time. In an era of advancing artificial intelligence, amidst an endless stream of digital content, it proves to be a powerful tool for unique, sincere, and meaningful visual expression, directly addressing the experience and emotions of each viewer. The exhibition aims to outline the contours of this phenomenon in a group portrait of leading Moscow painters of the 2020s.

The eleven artists invited to participate in the project belong to the creative generation that received their professional education at the beginning of this century at two of Moscow’s leading universities, the Surikov Institute and Stroganov University. All of them are accomplished, sought-after artists at the peak of their skills — true stars of today’s art, with a recognizable individual style and striking charisma. Some of them are already teaching, educating future generations of students. In their works, they each, in their own unique way, refract the academic method, freely and consciously transforming it across a wide range, from hyperrealism and neo-expressionism to abstraction. Rather than formally deconstructing, they find an adequate language for expressing their artistic overarching goals — one that is free from cynicism and always grounded in the grand history of art.

Each artist is presented "close-up" in their own room, featuring paintings and graphic works from large thematic series and projects spanning recent years. Many of the works are being shown for the first time or have previously only been shown in other cities. Some iconic pieces were created specifically for the exhibition. The painting rooms, conceived as complete, original installations, are sometimes expanded with sculptures and objects — and with them, the characters and images in the paintings gain volume and enter physical space, becoming guides for the viewer.

A journey through the exhibition immerses you in unique artistic worlds at the intersection of the real and the imaginary, built around the memories, interests, obsessions, anxieties, and dreams of their creators. Through the projection of their personalities, their individual selves, the traditional system of painting genres is transformed, blending the private and the civic, the historical and the intimate, the mythological and the everyday. However, at the epicenter is always the individual and their reflection, their nostalgia for meaning. Through new realistic painting (as a kind of practice of "hauntological" self-therapy), the artists strive to reassemble individual fragments of the worldview, the ghostly phenomena of sensory experience, in order to preserve and transmit into the future a conception of humanity.

Curators: Anna Arutyunyan, Andrey Egorov

Participants of the exhibition:  Egor Plotnikov, Egor Koshelev, Evgenia Buravleva, Anastasia Kuznetsova-Ruf, Evgenia Voinar, Ivan Korshunov, Ivan Novikov, Maria Safronova, Anton Kuznetsov, Sayan Baygaliev, Alexander Kupalyan