The exhibition "There was a city ..."

Alpert Gallery presents the exhibition "There Was a City…". The past tense in Brodsky’s poem, from which the name is borrowed, is not literal, it is only evidence of perception aberration, a multifaceted image of the city captured in the soul. It is in such a rhythm - pulsating, fractional - that the exposition is built up, which includes works united by urban themes.

The memoirs of Vladimir Paroshin from the series “Yards of Our Childhood” literally return to the past - to the unique atmosphere of Moscow courtyards, many of which, alas, no longer exist.

Paroshin Vladimir. Grotto in Lefortovo

Paroshin Vladir. Moscow house

Elena Gagarina’s foggy winter Venice is similar to the image of the city created by Brodsky in the essay “Fondamenta degli incurabili”: the splendor of a wet promenade illuminated by a fading lantern light, a pier with sleeping gondolas, a closed cafe… A portal to the past - a black door of a modest channel lost in a labyrinth of canals, storing the touch of the hands of several generations of its owners.

Gagarina Elena

Gagarina Elena

The works of Irina Bogdanova are sometimes laconic, on the verge of abstraction, and can be perceived as a paraphrase of a Suprematist statement that can be transformed into a realistic image: be it the square of a courtyard-well or the color stripes of Rio’s facades. Frontal compositions from the “Facades” series are similar to stories about the life of houses. Often, supplemented by staffage, they acquire a genre color, turning into life-filled stories.

Irina Bogdanova

Irina Bogdanova

The urban aesthetics of Inna Volvak takes beyond the usual architecture. Here, the urban landscape is what can be seen both in the clearance of freight cars, and behind the rusty gates at the Moscow freight station - Paveletskaya, and on the graffiti-covered walls of industrial buildings on the outskirts of Milan.

Volvak Inna. Goal. Moscow Commodity-Paveletskaya. 70x100

Volvak Inna. Wagons. Moscow Commodity-Paveletskaya. 100x70

The city stories of Andrei Shatilov are not commonplace, sometimes absurd and often dramatic. Blue cubicles of city toilets as a story about their harsh caretaker; a heating pipe soaring against the backdrop of a beautiful panorama of the city is like the cradle of a homeless person; the contents of the garbage container as a Christmas present for guest workers… And next to these almost Dickensian stories is an App-style urban kaleidoscope. Art, in which instead of colors - colorful magazine and newspaper clippings, the dynamics of letters and texts.

Shatilov Andrey. Toilet, triptych, 150x80, oil on canvas, 2012

Shatilov Andrey

The authors are not in a hurry to “rush after” “missing something”… And the viewer, once in the exhibition space, gets a rare opportunity today to carefully and leisurely explore the diversity and depth of this “air-stone theater of the times” - the city that is there was.