Exhibition of Yuri Albert and Viktor Skersis "Inappropriate Thoughtfulness"

ILONA-K artspace presents the exhibition of Yuri Albert and Viktor Skersis, which will unfold on two floors of the Mercury Tower, Moscow City. Bound by many years of friendship, the artists work in the field of analytical conceptualism. Their work is not characterized by some common recognizable style, on the contrary, it consists of various projects describing and exploring often completely unrelated phenomena and processes of art. The exhibition will feature over 30 new works created specifically for ILONA-K.

In Yuri Albert’s project "I am still alive (2018)", the viewer will see a kind of artist’s calendar. At twelve, according to the number of months, the mirrors show the artist’s foggy traces of breathing - one for each day of the calendar, as if someone were checking whether the author was still alive, was he breathing? Albert’s project, invented even before the outbreak of the epidemic, turned out to be visionary, asks the viewer about the relationship between the artist and the work: is a work of art an autonomous object, an encrypted message, or is it just a product of the author’s life activity?

Talking about the project, the artist reveals the model of art used in it: “Art is not for looking at it, but for thinking about it. As long as we think about it, it exists. As long as it is alive, we have something to breathe. So we breathed a little art for you so that you have something to think about. And in general, it is interesting: is the painting an image, a mirror of the surrounding life, a message about the truth revealed to the artist, or just a confirmation that the artist is still alive? "

According to Viktor Skersis: “Art is a phenomenon of the universe, given to us in an infinite variety of semantic spaces of our thinking. We cannot give a single and only correct definition of art, but we can build models and give definitions to what is called art. The model presented at the exhibition suggests that art is a manifestation of thinking, it is a dream that everyone can see. In this dream, abstract reflections are presented as concrete images, and concrete objects are abstractions. The play of the obvious and the implied is art! "

The exposition presents two projects by Viktor Skersis: "Do not believe your eyes!" and "Patterns". In the project “Don’t Believe Your Eyes,” the artist develops the concept of “Allegorical Abstraction” by the “King of the Hill” group (Y. Albert, P. Davtyan, V. Skersis, A. Filippov), in which the created abstract work was endowed with a rather long, as if allegorical, with a title such as "Apelles sniffing at Alexander the Great." The title of the work places the abstract picture in the semantic space of the allegory, that is, the abstraction loses the property of non-representativity, which is fundamental for abstract painting, and becomes an image.