Exhibition "Sergey Chernov. Playing with the Avant-Garde"

From January 23 to March 16, 2025, the Gallery on Shabolovka of the "Exhibition Halls of Moscow" Association will host a solo exhibition by Sergey Chernov that will immerse the viewer in a world of contemporary interpretation of the ideas of Russian cosmism and the avant-garde.

The artist and sculptor of three-dimensional space, Sergey Chernov, has long been engaged in a search for a symbiosis of archaic images and contemporary radical forms, repeatedly turning to the mythologemes of the Russian avant-garde. This often takes the form of a Game — a kind of interaction with nature, with living and non-living objects, and with places of power whose topography is directly connected to landmark events in the history of the avant-garde, creating a kind of fictional discourse.

Here is what the artist says: "The theme was not chosen by chance; for quite a long time I have been in a process of continuous dialogue with the modernist tradition of the 20th century. But the Russian avant-garde for me is something more — a cultural phenomenon, always indicating the search for a new national identity and, above all, an exceptional mode of artistic construction. The relevance of the historical Avant-garde is especially obvious now, when culture exposes unexpected layers, previously hidden meanings and significances."

A place of power, "revealing unexpected layers of meanings," for the project's author has for more than three decades been the Shabolovka district and its surrounding neighborhoods. He lives here; it is here, "in the shadow of the Shukhov Tower," that images referring to the ideas of the first Russian cosmists are born; here he works, realizing paradoxically beautiful utopian ideas not yet cast into their forms.

In Sergey Chernov's exhibition projects, historical narratives are often played out: from the past toward a hypothetical future. For example, El Lissitzky believed that Suprematism could overcome earthly gravity and devised projects for flying cities, while Kazimir Malevich drew so-called "planites" — architecton-spacecraft designed to colonize other planets.

The exposition at the Gallery on Shabolovka, as always in Chernov's projects, is organized so that the overall plan resembles a volumetric rebus. And in this way the viewer also plays, interpreting the artist's intent in their own way.

As the project's curators Dmitry Butkevich and Alexander Kremer write: "A contemporary artist engaging with this legacy faces a difficult choice — either to create an homage, literally expressing respect to the masters of the past by continuing lines once set out, or to attempt to free themselves from the pressure of authorities in search of original concepts and expressive means. Sergey Chernov in his work finds a special, poetic way of exploring the Russian avant-garde."

The main ideological message of the objects and installations from the series "Playing with the Avant-Garde" lies in ironic correspondence with the historical avant-garde, and primarily the Russian one. Once the avant-garde movement was a natural reaction to a rapidly changing world. Humanity made a giant leap and the Space Age began. The need for a new artistic aesthetic, languages, and ideas was not merely urgent; the main principles of the Art of the Future were being formulated. And the contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the world's cultural heritage must be properly appreciated.

Suprematist birdhouses, cosmic modules-architectons, suprematist busts of ancient heroes, the Russian stove imagined as the world's first supremus-object ("Stove-portal"), and so on — are executed by the artist in a unique authorial technique of "hybrid mixing" — combining forms and meanings that are incompatible in reality and subsequently immersing them in a contemporary context.