"Ripples." Exhibition of works from the collection of Mikhail Alshibay (Moscow)

May 21 at 16.00 in the Perm Art Gallery will open the exhibition "Ripples". The exhibition presents works of non-conformist art from the collection of the famous Moscow cardiac surgeon Mikhail Alshibaya (Moscow). The curator of the exhibition is Julia Lebedeva (Moscow).

Mikhail Mikhailovich Alshibaya (b. 1958) - professor, doctor of medical sciences, head of the coronary surgery department of the Scientific Center for Cardiovascular Surgery named after A.N. Bakuleva RAMS.

In all his forms (doctor, scientist and collector), Mikhail Alshibaya is an experimenter. He began collecting works of Soviet nonconformists in 1986, quickly realizing how superficially this art was studied, and soon expanded his circle of interests towards modernity. The collection of Mikhail Alshibay is an author’s view of the period in the history of Russian art for half a century. Today, his collection has several thousand works.

The exhibition will feature about sixty exhibits. Among them are not only works by nonconformist artists, but also works by representatives of contemporary (contemporary) art, as well as sketches of theatrical costumes of the 1920s and 1960s.

Julia Lebedeva:

- Having called the project “Ripples”, we wanted to reflect on the fact that art and collection are a living organism, filled with emotions, pulsating and beating like a heart. On the example of works created at different times, several parallel stories unfold at once - art, love of art and, of course, life itself.

Here - the magic of images, and the magic of words, and the magic of numbers. The works in the exposition seem to “talk” with each other. We built, perhaps at first glance, strange, but extremely interesting dialogues. Theatrical sketches resonate with the paintings, in the plots of which there are elements of theatricality: for example, Dmitry Plavinsky’s watercolor “Venice” looks like decoration, the plots of painting by Andrei Demykin and Anatoly Slepyshev look like theatrical productions, and Viktor Pivovarov’s illustrations to Igor Kholin’s poems look like tragic masks.

Here you can find compositions from playing cards by Vladimir Nemukhin, flowers by Vladimir Yakovlev, portraits by Igor Voroshilov, Anatoly Zverev and Natalia Turnova, still lifes by Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Mikhail Grobman, Eduard Shteinberg and rediscovered collector Natalya Kasatkina, disturbing city scenes in pencil drawings Alexei Kamensky, Bella Levikova, Klara Golitsyna Vitas Stasyunas and the view from the "Window" by Mikhail Roginsky, word games by Andrei Abramov, Yuri Albert, Sergei Volkov and Dm Yuri Gutov and much more.

A special theme in the collection and at the exhibition is “heart affairs”: several images of the heart, including a joint work by Maria Arendt and Mikhail Alshibay himself “Cutting and sewing courses” - a performance installation shown at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2012, when the cardiac surgeon left several special medical stitches at the artist’s work in fabric with embroideries depicting heart surgery.

Michael Alshibaya:

- My collection is devoted to the so-called non-conformist art - art, which in Soviet times was considered "anti-Soviet", but in reality strove for the main thing that exists in human life and the life of art - freedom. Only a small fragment of my collection will be shown at the exhibition, but given that the art of the theater is the main theme of the festival, we will present the theatrical works of artists as an epigraph.

However, a kind of drama is inherent in easel paintings and graphic works. The clash of plastics defines this dramaturgy, but also the conceptual moment too. Life is a theater - the great playwrights of the past Calderon and Shakespeare said, life is a dream - they repeated. Theater and dreams, refracted in painting and pulsating - this is the main theme of this exhibition.

The exhibition runs until June 23, 2019.