Exhibition "Avant-garde, which was not"

On August 30, at 18-30, the Perm Art Gallery will host the opening of the exhibition "The Vanguard That Was Not There". The exposition is dedicated to a vivid, but not completely meaningful phenomenon in the artistic life of Perm - unofficial art of the period 1960-2008.

The name of the exhibition project “Avant-garde, which was not” refers to the 2011 exhibition of the same name, which took place as part of the Living Perm festival. This was one of the first attempts to recall the events of the end of the last century in Perm that took place in that cultural environment, which was called “informals” and “underground”. We intend to return to this fascinating, but not completely meaningful story: to present the art process as a kind of social network, where independent artists and self-organizing creative unions interacted and influenced each other. Through informal art associations of Perm, many representatives of today’s regional elite, prominent public and creative figures, scientists and artists have passed.

The works of the late Soviet / perestroika underground are usually regarded as a marginal phenomenon that does not have “neither roots nor fruits”, although it is already experiencing the third generation, which speaks, if not of the established tradition, then of a phenomenon worthy of systematic study and presentation. Moreover, there is every reason for this: until the Perm Museum of Modern Art appeared, only the Perm Gallery was engaged in collecting and studying unofficial art for several decades, the collections of which today contain a significant collection of the local underground, as well as works by artists from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, affecting the work of Perm.

In addition to the works of informal artists, the exposition will feature experiments of famous Perm artists - “classics” in search of a new visual method, memories of participants and witnesses about events related to the Perm artistic underground.

The exposition is based on archival documents and works from the collections of the Perm Gallery, Perm Museum of Local Lore, the Maris-Art Gallery, from the workshops of artists, private collections (Perm, Moscow, St. Petersburg), the Moscow gallery FineArt, and the New Collection Foundation ".

Among the names presented in the chronicles of unofficial art of 1960-2008: Alexander Repin, Vyacheslav Smirnov, Vadim Kapridov, Victor Matsumaro, Anatoly Filimonov, Anatoly Frenkel, Victor Gerasimenko, Alexander Kaznacheev, Timofey Kovalenko, Stepan and Elena Kalyupanov, Rifkat Bagautodinov, Mikhail Rifkat Bagautodinov, Brusilovsky (EkB), Vitaly Tyulenev (St. Petersburg), Gennady Mosin (EkB), Francisco Infante (Moscow), Vitaliy Statsinsky (Moscow), Igor Makarevich (Moscow), Dmitry Prigov (Moscow), Dmitry Gutov (Moscow), Mitki (St. Petersburg) and other artists. In addition, the exhibition gives an idea of the activities of informal communities of artists: “Narodnaya Volnovskaya”, “Kislovodskaya”, “Family”, “Blankets”, “Non-Artists”, art group “Cube” and others.

Curators of the exhibition:

Mikhail Surkov
Vladimir Beresnev
Marina Pugina

The exhibition will run from August 30 to November 4, 2018.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Perm Territory.