picks May 06, 2021

Genevieve Goffman

Once a Moscow staple, the project space Money Gallery recently moved north to Saint Petersburg, where it set up shop in a former garage in one of the city’s hallowed courtyards. Forgoing the visible pipes, flaking walls, and other signs of gritty “authenticity” so beloved in the erstwhile capital, gallery founders Ilya Smirnov and Anna Teterkina purged the space of any visual clutter, painting the walls white and the floor red. For the inaugural exhibition, a square white pedestal in the middle of the space is crowned with Grind, 2021, a single sculpture by New York–based artist Genevieve Goffman.

picks April 29, 2021

Alexey Pankin

Alexey Pankin drew the title of this exhibition, “He feels at home in the May beetle song,” from a poem by Paul Celan which itself references a German folk ditty written during the bloody wars of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Here, the artist, presents twelve of his latest untitled pieces, designed with 3-D modelling software and milled from wood. Stage lights cut through the darkened galleries, snatching a progression of human-shaped figures out of the blackness. Though the majority of the sculptures are suspended in strange, IKEA-like aluminum frames, others sit directly on the

picks January 29, 2021

Vladimir Kartashov

This show, titled “Innocent Pranks. Technorococo,” marks the fourth exhibition organized by curator Sergey Khachaturov to feature the twenty-three-year-old Vladimir Kartashov. In 2018, the artist filled an entire hall of the Tsaritsyno Estate Museum with human-sized superhero and villain figures on canvas for the group show “Space Hypnosis.” A year later, in “Cosmorama XVIII,” he used plastic miniatures to erect a few rayoks—Russian traditional fairground peep shows—within the Museum of Moscow. (The third show, “The Concert of Birds,” is currently up at Tsaritsyno.) If these mischievous undertakings

picks November 17, 2020

Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev

Located in two capacious spaces on the second and fortieth floors of Moscow’s Mercury City Tower, gallery ILONA—K, the latest addition to Moscow’s art scene, opened with “Drowning by Numbers,” a presentation of works made over the last ten years by the artist duo Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. The fantastically expensive real estate of the venue resonates with the shiny monumentalism of No Comment, 2013, an installation of large, gleaming balls and various pyramidal and spruce-shaped objects (reminiscent of sex toys) arranged on the floor. Here and elsewhere, these artists work in a post-Pop conceptual

picks August 05, 2020

Andrey Bogush & Nikita Alexeev

For this two-artist exhibition, Osnova—a young gallery that recently decamped from the decaying, privately owned Winzavod Center for Art for new digs on the opposite side of Moscow—joined forces with the veteran Galerie Iragui to present an intergenerational pairing of Russian artists. Osnova puts forward several artworks by Andrey Bogush, including two tiny clay sculptures and four digital prints—relics from the short but noisy era of post-internet art, they combine photography, CGI geometric figures, and digital scribbles against simple backgrounds. Iragui contributes two series, both 2020,

picks March 24, 2020

Maria Safronova

Actual and fictional, or fictionalized, catastrophes have been increasingly mixed up in modern consciousness. From recent ecological disasters resonating with HBO’s Chernobyl and the disintegration of half of all life in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, to speculative discussions about the dismantling of democracy in the wake of COVID-19, the postapocalyptic turn in culture and society is well underway, and we are only belatedly taking notice.

Inspired by Soviet educational posters, the two series of paintings presented in Maria Safronova’s exhibition “What If?” portray the lead-up to and the

picks January 22, 2020

Jura Shust

Slavic mythology meets a globalized illicit industry and sacral rituals move to digital platforms in Jura Shust's “NEOPHYTE,” the Berlin-based Belarusian artist's inaugural show at Fragment Gallery. At the exhibition’s entrance, a wall installation of iron soleplates outfitted with green strobe lights illuminates a display of onions growing in wine glasses—an allusion to Soviet home gardening and to the anonymous web-browsing software Tor (also known as “The Onion Router”). The next room houses more strange things: a crushed bicycle suspended from the ceiling and encrusted with fern fronds and

Sergey Guskov