Alexander Brodsky
Olga Chernysheva
Ivan Chuikov
Yuri Avvakumov
Ilya Kabakov
Vitaly Komar
Oleg Kulik
Dmitri Prigov
8 Russian artists who explore a panoply of collective and private dreams and visions, conditioned and informed by the Soviet ideological utopia. The exhibition takes the form of an installation, where the viewer can access drawings, prints, photographs, paintings and albums by browsing through the storage system of a semi-abandoned depository.
Group show
"Depository of Dreams" brings together the work of eight internationally renowned
Russian contemporary artists who explore a panoply of collective and private dreams
and visions, conditioned and informed by the Soviet ideological utopia. The
exhibition takes the form of an installation, where the viewer can access drawings,
prints, photographs, paintings and albums by browsing through the storage system of
a semi-abandoned depository.
The artists in the exhibition represent the major independent art movements in
post-World War II and post-Soviet Russia. On show are 1970's "Moscow Conceptualists"
(Ilya Kabakov, Ivan Chuikov, Dmitri Prigov), "Sots Art" (Vitaly Komar), 1980's
"Paper Architecture" (Alexander Brodsky and Yuri Avvakumov), as well as more recent
works by notorious performance artist Oleg Kulik, and well-known social documentary
artist Olga Chernysheva.
The depository will reveal iconic pieces by Moscow conceptual artists such as Ilya
Kabakov's album Mathematical Gorsky,1974, from the series Ten Characters, Ivan
Chuikov's Window painting, and Dmitri Prigov's series of drawings Phantom
Installations. Yuri Avvakumov, one of the founders of the "Paper Architecture"
movement presents a series of prints designed as ironic reminiscence of Tatlin's
constructivist Monument to the Third International, developing like a scaffolding
around the skeleton of Mukhina's Monument to Worker and Farmer, the popular icon of
Socialist Realism.
United around essential characteristic of Russian culture as a culture of hidden
meanings, the artists in the exhibition all converge on the idea of the archive as a
way to make tangible the true essence of their history. In essence Depository of
Dreams is such archive.
Image: Yuri Avvakumov
Private view: Wednesday 29 November, 6.30 - 9pm
White Space Gallery
St Peter's Church, Vere Street London
Free admission