"Russia fly by": The artists

For the new HangART-7 program “Russia fly by”, seven artists from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk searched for and found visual metaphors for the new Russian soul: they are marked by the societal upheavals since the end of communism, influenced by market mechanisms, and haunted by ghosts of the past.

The small but intense arts scene of the Siberian industrial city Novosibirsk is represented by Sergei Besamyatnykh, who already became famous during the 1990s while he was studying architecture: he calls himself a "psychomechanical formalist" and comes from the school of "paper architects" who designed buildings and constructions whose realization was technically impossible.



The four artists from St. Petersburg bring to the exhibition works of figurative painting that often revolve around the motif of the fly as a symbol for societal processes and changes—as with Sergei Denisov. Following intensive work on installations and collages, he returned to painting in 2006 with his cycle "Natural Stories."





Vitaly Pushnitsky is one of the few relevant Russian artists to have gone through traditional training at the Moscow Arts Academy. The substance of his pictures is frequently determined by the perspective he selects for them—for example in the giant "Sky 1," conceived as a ceiling painting.





Dmitry Shorin achieved his artistic breakthrough in 2000 with the large-format picture series "Catastrophes." In this series Shorin, who resided in a squatted house of city-wide repute, deals with the dramatic events that took place at the end of the twentieth century—such as the sinking of the submarine Kursk and the deadly accident of Princess Diana.





Novosibirsk is also the original home of Marina Alexeyeva, in whose three-dimensional, black-and-white miniature interiors the "lowly" and the "noble" meet.







The fly is also used as a motif by Muscovite Diana Machulina—such as in the series "Slogans," where the banner lettering "We are free" turns out, upon closer inspection, to be composed of a large number of flies.






Like her, the other Muscovite Alexander Pogorzhelsky makes use of—and shatters—socialist-realist paradigms: the agricultural machines of his protagonists seem to destroy more than they cultivate.