About all the things that live there

I don’t like the fragmentation of the universe. We’ll have to go to the learned German. He has a short reckoning with existence; Having brought everything to a reasonable combination, He will mend the holes in the universe with an old dressing gown and other rags. G. Heine Stella Art Foundation presents the project “About all the things that live there” by artists Nina Kotel, Alexandra Mitlyanskaya and Evgenia Solomatina. The exhibition will bring together more than 50 works shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition includes works from the photographic series “And this too shall pass” by Evgenia Solomatina, meditative-static videos by Alexandra Mitlyanskaya (including a copy of the work from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) and a new series of works by Nina Kotel, including a colossal one specially created for the main hall of the Foundation space scroll 25 meters long.

The epigraph is a poem by Heinrich Heine, dedicated to the poet’s teacher, the great philosopher of German idealism, Hegel. It mocks in a good-natured manner the thinker’s grandiose ambition to bring life to a logical, clear and final order. Behind the obvious irony of this work, we can discern the poet’s important intuition regarding our complex, almost intimate relationship with the gaps in the rational picture of the world, as well as the objects intended to bridge this gap. This intuition is shared by the artists in the exhibition, revealing various aspects of this complex economy of interaction with emptiness.

The lens of Evgenia Solomatina’s camera is directed somewhat to the side and tangentially in relation to the object of photographic interest. The artist’s photographs resemble still images from a movie, frozen at the moment of a change of plans. They focus more on the void between objects than on specific objects. The reflection of light on the wall in a hotel room, a casual glance at a fragile collarbone, the gap between the curtain and the window sill, the seething ripples of water - these fleeting, moving, fragmentary images support the integrity of our experience of everyday life.

We can meet the heroes of Nina Kotel’s works in their natural habitat - in the depths of the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, in the far corner of the top shelf, inside a box forgotten on the mezzanine. In a sense, the surrounding space is not only what is outside or inside, but also the irreducible remainder between. It is in these “non-places” that objects that have lost their original function accumulate: a piece of glass, a bead, a worn toy, a wooden ball, and others. Collectively, these memorabilia coalesce into a useful sentimental layer that feeds and supports a personal story.

The lens of Alexandra Mitlyanskaya’s camera, aimed at the emptiness of the landscape, captures the world impartially and coldly. Edmund Burke, in his essay “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” compares landscape to emptiness, using the concept of “sublime horror.” The romantic philosopher argues that a landscape can evoke mixed emotions of horror and admiration in a person, and its fundamental quality is the endless and indivisible emptiness of space between the folds of the relief. We can say that the landscape for Burke is a hole from which the eye of the sublime looks at the dumbfounded traveler. Alexandra Metlyanskaya’s static camera brings back this look. Trying on the point of view of a mechanical, motionless eye, the viewer discovers the magic of the movement of life in the emptiness of a frozen landscape.

Nina Kotel

Born in 1949 in Kyiv. In 1980 he moved to Moscow, and in 1987 he became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Since 1974 he has participated in exhibition projects: The Pyramid Show (Australia, Sydney, Moscow Palette gallery, 1990-1991); 3rd Novosibirsk International Biennale of Contemporary Graphics (Novosibirsk, 2003); Horizons of Reality (Belgium, Antwerp, Museum of Modern Art, 2003); Zen-d’Art. Gender history of art in the post-Soviet space: 1989-2009 (Moscow, MMSI, 2010); Only paper (Moscow, XL gallery, 2016); Bombay-Moscow. The neural network will not come up with such a fairy tale (Moscow, Totibadze Gallery, 2021). In 2004 she was awarded the professional Prize “Master”-2003. The works are in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Center for Contemporary Art and other domestic museums (Nizhny Tagil, Novosibirsk, Orel, Stavropol, Tomsk, in the A.P. Chekhov House-Museum in Yalta). Lives and works in Moscow.

Alexandra Mitlyanskaya

Born in 1958 in Moscow. Participant in exhibition projects: Results (Germany, Berlin, exhibition hall of the Berlin Academy of Arts, 1996); Galerie am Lindenplatz (Liechtenstein, Vaduz, 2000); Art-Chicago fair (USA, Chicago, Krokin Gallery 2002); SFIAE (USA, San Francisco, Krokin Gallery, 2003); Collage (Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 2003); Adventures of the Black Square (St. Petersburg, State Russian Museum, 2007); ART-index (Latvia, Riga, Latvian National Museum of Art, 2008); Walking around Moscow (India, Delhi, Lalit Kali Academi, 2012); Between reality and fantasy (Korea, Gyeongju, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015); Unhomed (Sweden, Uppsala, Uppsala konstmuseum, 2020), Video city (Switzerland, Basel, Magmart international video festival, 2020, 2021) and in other cities in Russia and abroad. Winner of the Now and Then video festival (2011), Kandinsky Prize nominee (2017), Joseph Brodsky Foundation fellow (2019), resident of the American Academy in Rome (2019). Her works are in the collections of the Hermitage, Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum. A. S. Pushkin, Russian Museum, MMoMA, NCCA, ROSPHOTO, in the collections of museums and art galleries in Russia and other countries. Lives and works in Moscow.

Evgenia Solomatina

Born in 1978, in Almaty. In 2000 she moved to Moscow. In 2022 she graduated from the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia named after. A. Rodchenko. Studied at the School of Contemporary Art “Free Workshops” MMOMA. Since 2022, has been taking part in exhibitions, art fairs and festivals: Ground Zine Fest, festival of author’s books and short-circulation literature, (Moscow, Ground Solyanka gallery, 2022); ISSUE 22 (Moscow, media center in Zaryadye, 2022); 17 (Moscow, PENLAB gallery, 2022); Pushkin House zine fair (Alnglia, London, Pushkin House cultural center, 2023); Dead End 20 23, contemporary art fair (Moscow, ART4 museum, 2023). Lives and works in Moscow.

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