Dinara Hertnagl’s exhibition "Talking Walls" 12+

The Talking Walls project is a collaboration of the painter Dinara Hertnagl and street artists, including Stas Bugs, Vladimir Abikh, Maxim Ima, Super 158, Nikita Dusto, Shards, Martin Aroe, Sasha Sam and Turben.

Dinara Hertnagl - a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts - entered the street world thanks to his youthful passion for hip-hop. She studied in a dance studio and worked at major events with multiple world break dance champions. Today the triad of “hip-hop, break-dance, graffiti”, on which Dinara grew up, is deservedly called the “old school”, although one could already speak about retro aesthetics.

The authors with whom Dinara Hertnagl "broke" the canvases are young artists more in spirit than in age. About 10 years ago, the name of Stas Bugs did not leave the pages of publications about the life of the city, and the artist created incredibly inventive objects during this period. Today the same can be said about Vladimir Abikha: an author who has robbed on the streets of Yekaterinburg is increasingly taking part in polyphonic exhibition projects at street art festivals throughout the country. Maxim Ima is famous for experimental curatorship in the no less experimental - and, perhaps, one of a kind - Protvor space. The anonymous author (or group of authors) "Shards" and Nikita Dusto over the past 5 years have tagged all obscure city posts, booths and lockers with their tags. These engineering objects are absolutely invisible to pedestrians, like sewer manholes. Only the sonorous and sharp inscription “Shards” or the chubby “Dusto” gives us a meeting with them. Super 158 is known as the organizer of "Reiter Jams", which take place at various venues in St. Petersburg: it is from them that variegated gazelles later travel around the city. Turben is an artist with a graffiti background, recently noted by a museum exhibition. His area of interest is naive art and popular culture. Sasha Sam and Martin Aroe are graffiti writers as they are: only letters, only virgin walls hidden in the bowels of entrance courtyards. Although Sam has a work on canvas. One way or another, all of the above authors belong to the active generation, which for the lack of instant messengers or blogs preferred to write on desks or on the walls of porches.

Actually, the paintings of Dinara Hertnagl show us non-residential, uncomfortable houses of the 19th century with dark windows and cracked, stucco-covered stucco. A rusting Soviet garage, a concrete fence on which the struggle of light and shadow unfolds, and drips of paint on the firewall are quite interesting textures for the painter. The stigmas of street artists in this case become the perfect complement to the well-trained paintings of Dinara Hertnagl. Those same people worked hard on her canvases, whose “creativity” you would hardly want to get to know, but it just so happened that it is around you. The most interesting thing that they do, often remains inside the hermetic world of street culture or perishes at the hands of public utilities. Not the best deeds survive. The project presented at the Erarta Museum - including the difficulties of translating the street language: we are far from always able to understand what the walls are trying to tell us about. The houses in Dinara Hertnagl’s paintings are endangered dinosaurs with no specific addresses. They can be found in any Russian city, and the traces left on their walls by street artists are signs of imminent death: imminent destruction or radical renovation.