(Pro) Image. Exhibition of Maria and Alexander Pogorzhelsky

The curator of the exhibition and the author of the text is Tatyana Martyanova

The game. A life. Masks History. Way. Meaning. Vos (Compound). About (Image).

Alexander Pogorzhelsky is represented by a new series of works by Folk embroidery motifs (oil on canvas, 2019, a total of 22 paintings) and the monumental installation of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, consisting of 120 drawings (paper, pencil, 2018-2019).

The abstract "embroidery" of transcendental images on the canvases of Folk embroidery motifs is an invitation to the artist to comprehend the immanent principles; it is no coincidence that the pastel tones of orange and white prevail: in the theory of color, their shades carry the energy of both life and death. Metaphysics. At the same time, the installation of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors works and takes on a very special sacred meaning in the space of the GUM-Red-Line gallery: against the backdrop of Moscow’s Red Square, costume designs captivate the viewer in the centuries-old history of traditions, reviving the collective memory of generations. Aeternum.

Maria Pogorzhelskaya is represented by the new Private Zone project (oil on canvas, 2007–2019, a total of 30 paintings), exhibited for the first time in full at our exposition. Most of the work was done in 2019 ad hoc for this exhibition, but viewers will also see portraits of Natalia Vodianova, painted by the artist in 2012 for the project of Vogue magazine.

Private Zone is in the field of individual, momentary, accurate reproduction of a certain moment of private female life. Photographic memory and “quick light” on the plane are the artist’s main tool, in the best traditions of “new realism”. It is no coincidence and many times the small format of the work serves as a sketch of the big picture, like a negative for photography. A kind of “metamorphosis of etude” is a separate line of certain paintings presented for the study of the viewer at the exhibition. Hic et nunc.

The exhibition “Pro (Image)” gives an idea of the direction of modern painting, the spaces of which are at the crossroads of a certain eastern and western art - this is the identification of objectively different, but logically consistent approaches to painting.

Our narrative is not tied to the stylistic features and characteristic formulas of the works of Pogorzhelsky, but goes along the “tangents” in the framework of the same visual practice and refined color ownership of both artists. The energy of two-dimensional figures on a flat background.

Masks They are the ones who bring the viewer through history to the origins and identities. Be it a folk / ceremonial costume of the ancestors and an abstract-mythical timeless image (Alexander Pogorzhelsky) or a mask of the daily ritual of female self-care and an accurate portrait (often a self-portrait) in a specific time period, the reality is “here now” (Maria Pogorzhelskaya). The search for identity through the past and the expression of essence through the present, everyday. Sacralization of both historical memory and individual memory.

The connotations of time are beaten by both artists through the concept of memory by intentionally denying an increase in “non-places” in modern society, within the framework of the anthropology of the “hypermodern” Auger and social space. “A space that is not defined either through identity, or through connections, or through history, is a“ non-place. ”… hypermodernity produces “non-places”, that is, places that themselves are not anthropological places and, unlike Baudelaire modernity, do not connect historical places,… that is, “places of memory” *.

The curatorial project presented is an attempt to direct the viewer to the perception of the exhibition space precisely as a “place of memory” through an intuitive (in Bergson sense) recreation of reality through a prototype. Indeed, only intuition, being a direct experience of an object of art, "is embedded in its intimate essence" **.

Thus, through the presented artwork, a holistic “emotionally-intuitive” comprehension of reality, real or imagined, takes place.