“de nos jours” does not refer nor to our daily life, nor to just today as a definition of contemporary. It rather embraces view that is much broader than a traditional Western conception of time, in order to conceive a more fluid escaping moment that does not have to either deal with the past nor worry about what future brings.


This kind of conception is close to the philosophical concept of “presentism”, however the collective present here does not intend to mention the concepts of the past and the future as two absolutely nonexistent human constructions. It would rather mark the present, expanding it to status quo of becoming, tracing the lightest breath of existentialism that inhales the moments of the present and then goes away, in order to praise the sweet persistence of qui et nunc.


Osnova Off-site is a programme of external exhibition projects that go beyond the gallery space. With the focus on young authors and personal projects presented at new experimental sites, it aims at a dialogue with the external context and research of the modern state of culture in a new, changing world.

Emanuel de Carvalho (Portuguese-Canadian) is a London-based visual artist. De Carvalho is currently enrolled at the Turps Banana Art School Studio Painting Programme after having completed a PhD degree at the University of Amsterdam. Their practice is predominantly focussed on painting while encompassing other mediums such as writing, drawing and photography.


In her work, Margo Trushina explores the intersection of bioart and new feminist materialist ethics. Her living sculptures and environments reflect upon recent discoveries in neuroscience, biotechnology and ecology through the lens of personal experience. In resonance with posthumanist turn in critical and political theory, the artist rediscovers more- than-human agencies within her own body undergoing physiological transformations.


Andrei Pokrovskii’s works are devoted to the problem of relations with various places, the issue of attachment to spaces (real, mythical or virtual) through the experience gained in their context: sensual and behavioral, meditative and emotional. In his works there is always a “stage” with the characters who inhabit or come from this place. On this “stage” the scenery controls the characters-actors through the created atmosphere and conditions of stay. In this way, through the body manipulations both actors and viewers gain the exceptional experience of staying in a particularlocation.


Jack Jubb (b. 1993, United Kingdom) is a painter living and working in London. Jack creates ghostly airbrushed paintings deriving from a bricolage of digital images spanning e-commerce, social media, and cinema amongst other sources. These blurred, desaturated renderings seek to examine the political and emotive state of the “poor image”, contemporary notions of haunting, and the ever- present threat of the quotidian becoming strange.


Jean-Philippe Dordolo’s work investigates notions of power and subversion through references to art history, and culture at large. These are often treated with a touch of humour and pathos. His use of drawing, sculpture and painting aims to challenge modes of representation and hierarchies. He often references the grotesque, editing features and exaggerating them. This extends to his material research where surfaces are drawn on with pastels and crayons, or saturated with colourful resin and expanding surface texture.
Dordolo is interested in the place of the viewer and the subject matter in the construction of a scene. Images are cropped as a reference to cinema and photography. The analogy continues in the way drawn scenes allude to moments ‘on the brink of...’, like suspended in time. With Die Raubvögel the nose grows into a beak. The wings sweat as the body of the creature is cropped and ultimately bound to its base plate. The vulture spreading and reaching out on the left, the cockerel on the right: nightmare at first, then finally daylight.

Ruoru Mou: «My works often mediate between a point of departure and a conclusion. Manifesting as sculpture, performance, installation and film they become forms of movement. Usually, but not always, the act of making becomes a process of recollection. This methodology is currently rooted in my interest in causality; cultural and archival inheritance; the process of translation; personal and collective history. I attempt to localise memory in concrete and yet permeable locations, whilst also engaging in an ongoing investigation of transitional and ‘non- spaces’. Advocating for different modes of play, the works slip between sculpture, craft and childhood games such as origami and modelling flying mechanisms. Narratives are constructed in the emulation of specific gestural language; calligraphic practice, paper folding, or the movement of flight. Stories are often being told when a subject or object rhymes its way through a seemingly unrelated setting. Often documented in moving-image or sculptural forms, the making process consists of repeated trial and error, which overtime creates a causal history of material and labour. Formatting the artworks as an anecdote or a prediction that is in opposition to arrival, I aim to think less of producing the artwork for presentation at a set moment, instead, working out a way to reconfigure the temporal constraints of spectacles discovered along the way...».

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the poem Thirteen by Lev Loseff*. Loseff rhymes Russian letters Ъ, Ы, and Ь (pronounced in the past as Er, Ery, and Er’) with the word ‘beast’ (Russian: zver’). Today, of those three letters we can only read the sound Ы. The impossibility of sound production seems to devastate these signs, and their shape comes to the fore while reminding us of how they look and not sound.

Nika Neelova’s artistic practice is inspired by the architectural environment and those elements that mediate between humans and space. The artist transforms familiar objects by revealing their latent potential: handrails twist into spirals, parquet boards rear up, and walls expose the armature. It seems that these objects reinvent themselves and become proof of the existence of such a world in which the ability of things to change their form voluntarily is not an aesthetic gesture, but a law. According to Gaston Bachelard, “Expressive power turns into substance.” This power allows us to imagine how “shadows tow after the letters” in Lev Loseff’s poem and how Nika Neelova’s sculptural images become real even when our eyes seem to deceive us.

The three-part title of the project rhymes with the arrangement of the exhibition divided into three halls. The exhibition will feature Lemniscate, the artist’s most famous sculpture series of works made of old wooden handrails; a large Folded Studio installation that echoes the contours of Neelova’s London workshop; Lateral Cuts wall objects that simulate cross-sections of building structures, and other works specifically commissioned for Moscow.

Artist Nika Neelova about her works:

My objects reflect the choreography of an absent human body. I use recycled materials because the world is already overpopulated with objects due to unethical manufacturing. Besides, the use of materials at the end of their life cycle allows overcoming time constraints. You always need to travel in time a bit.

Curators about the project:

When we started working on the project, the main challenge was to find an accurate metaphor that would unite all the works. As a result, it turned out that there is a potential (symbolic, temporal, geographical) in uncertainty. As for humans, a lot of things appear in the field of subjective knowledge, so we relied on sensations and associations that are difficult to verbalize and that do not need specifics.

Nika Neelova was born in 1987 in Moscow, Russia. She currently lives and works in London, UK. She graduated with a BA degree from the Royal Art Academy in The Hague (2008) and an MA degree in Sculpture from the Slade School of Art in London (2011). Over the years, she has participated in numerous international projects. Her solo exhibitions were held in London, Italy, Germany, Brussels, and the Netherlands. Nika Neelova’s works are in private and museum collections all over the world.

In terms of the Off-site programme Osnova gallery is presenting the solo exhibition of the artist Andrei Pokrovskii. In his works Andrey creates a series of closed, isolated space systems. These are panoramic views of courtyards, side streets and passages, whose prototype is the 18th century graphic album Monasticon Universum which contains topographic sketches of French abbeys. In the album the abbey architecture is presented cut-off and exists exclusively in a separate, or its own, dimension. In the same way, Andrei’s cloisters are the example of a perfectly isolated system which is “taken out” of the outside world and the familiar contexts.

As if in the old video game setting, we know nothing about the location - the space only possesses a hint of the backstory, the vague present and future. The monastic world-level accommodates-loads so few character-inhabitants that a guest, in the same way as a viewer, only lonely wanders through the half-empty and narrow interiors-dead ends, along the locked doors and passages - the islands of new medieval ensembles, - and in this at first sight low-interactive space a guest is given the role of an observer.

Andrey Pokrovskii was born in 1996 in Moscow. In 2016 he graduated from Moscow State University of Printing Arts, the Department of Graphic Design. In 2019 he graduated from British Higher School of Art and Design, the Illustration Course. His works are devoted to the problem of relations with various places, the issue of attachment to spaces (real, mythical or virtual) through the experience gained in their context: sensual and behavioral, meditative and emotional. In his works there is always a “stage” with the characters who inhabit or come from this place. On this “stage” the scenery controls the characters-actors through the created atmosphere and conditions of stay. In this way, through the body manipulations both actors and viewers gain the exceptional experience of staying in a particular location.

Recognizing, pointing, repeating – trying to bargain an anti-anxiety drug, local anesthesia. Counting rhyme as a way to call things and their features by their proper names. We thought that we were already existing in the post-pandemic time and that we could draw some clear conclusions about the new reality, but it appears that the situation is quite different. It is impossible to talk retrospectively about the world in economic, social, and biopolitical terms. The present is happening right now and changing in front of us. Therefore, the best we can do is to indicate the properties of the fragments of the present, thus avoiding the anxiety that they do not come together in a clear whole.

Katerina Sokolovskaya and Carla Chaim show how and where anxiety grows. Without a human being. As another object. The duo-project is based on the question of the relationship between body and space; and more generally - between all real things. With differing aesthetics but similar ideologies, artists reproduce the so-called "sensual objects". They indicate places of the pre/post/extra-contact tension. According to Graham Harman, things never directly relate to each other but they can contact via sensual objects. We can think of them as a third object that appears between two real ones. But what if we remove the real objects and leave only the sensual ones? Something purposefully sharp, something purposefully large, odd, torn off. After the bodies-things have been removed, we must stop in front of what is left and repeat: "this is big big big, and this is small small small".

Like two Alices in Wonderland, the artists throw into the space terrifying bizarre toys: huge eyes, sharp icicles, spider eyelashes, a six-armed beetle, and a message-cipher: handprints. But the essence of these things is not surreal. All these toys found themselves not in the imagination and not in the subconscious, but on the plane of the objective world, alongside with the walls and ceiling of the gallery, tables, chairs, and bodies of guests. Katya and Сarla create surfaces, retrieve sensual artifacts from the rabbit holes. Fear can run away from us like a white rabbit, delight can rise above us like a big mushroom, and doubt can flood everything around with restless waters.

Katerina Sokolovskaya (b. 1988, Minsk) is an artist-sculptor. After graduating from the Stieglitz Academy (St. Petersburg), she wondered what contemporary sculpture might look like. She moves toward the answer through performance and body practices. The artist looks into the body, listens to the different parts, and begins to divide it - arms, legs, head, eyes, etc. When you look at a part - the attention becomes concentrated, the feeling intensifies, and then it seems that you can better understand what is happening now. And therefore you can be a sculptor in whose hands the bodies are constellations of knots of attention; it migrates, builds up, and falls off into space in its "big folds".

Carla Chaim (b. 1984, São Paulo) works with performance and body in a classical way. Her own body is often the main medium in her practice. She places herself in a relationship with objects and space - taking measurements, marking segments, leaving traces. Her practice is directly related to the political situation in Brazil. "Since the last elections, there is a neo-liberalism that reigns vile and fascist<...> There is an overt necropolitics that becomes increasingly powerful and dictates, socially and politically, who should live and who should die". The regime becomes the basis for seeking freedom through one's body and making it to manifest freedom. Flags, slogans, manifestos - the elements that visually bind her practice.

* The sculpture "Big Eyes" by Katerina Sokolovskaya was produced with the support of the NCCA, for Art weekend 2020.

There’s somethin' happenin' here/ But what it is ain't exactly clear/ There's a man with a gun over there/ A-tellin' me I got to beware.

To take verses from a song like For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield, one must ask for it’s roots. Musician Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in November 1966 — a series of early counterculture-era clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California. Music fans felt infringed upon their civil rights, after local residents had become annoyed by crowds of young people and issued a strict curfew on the Strip after 10 p.m. To this day, the song captures the mood of a generation railing against the establishment, last on August 17, 2020, when Billy Porter sang For What It's Worth for the 2020 Democratic National Convention, a nod to the song's resurgent use in the George Floyd protests.

I think it's time we Stopp/ Children, what's that sound?/ Everybody look what's going down.

The Group Show Paranoia Strikes Deep combines works by artists Talia Chertrit, Andy Hope 1930, JPW3, Henning Strassburger, Alexandra Sukhareva, Philipp Timischl, Anna Virnich and Jan Zoeller, touching upon the awareness of the meaning of for what it’s worth. The main focus lies on the story behind seen images, the unrevealing of a hidden meaning, which subsequently changes the context of the before seen forever. The presented artworks display a concealed but never invisible perspective, questioning contemporary processes of canonization and codification.

These back stories can be seen in most displayed artworks, may it be in painter Jan Zoellers "Are we all going to the same place?", when burglars seem to have escaped through a window, out of a space that merely resembles a backdrop and not a canvas. Meanwhile, photographer Talia Chertrit took the images for the Murder Picture Series when she wasn't an artist yet. She staged them as a teenager with her friends, blurring lines between artistic practice and youth games by exhibiting them. Playing with these images of representation, Philipp Timischl dressed up as a drag queen in Downtown Bernis, only to lean against the masculine sculpture of a bear.

In spite of Henning Strassburgers paintings being abstract, they carry figurative meaning, as his work "Fun feet" is originated from a series of feet as seen from out of a yoga position, referring to the expectations of painting itself being a relaxing practice.

The exhibition plays with such assumptions of profundity and superimposition: While artist Anna Virnich provides elegant fabric images, she actually pulls them over the frame, making the layers almost appear like human skin during a cosmetic facelift. The reoccurring theme of the surface is also visible in Andy Hope 1930’s Unknown Series, as the canvas itself pretends that there is a big unknown. It points directly at it with the words, possessing a paranoia of its own, whereas in JPW3’s Y.O. Grill, everything on canvas seems blurred in a boiled layer of wax, melting away. Alluding a similar absence while being present, Alexandra Sukhareva’s Tolerance (living room with a view of Berggasse in May 1938) refers to the presence in photographs taken by Edmund Engelman, who took ghostly images of the apartment of one of the most important analysts of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, in the house at Bergstraße.

The artworks’ layered meanings show their narrative structure within the sidelines of their actual picture. In this cycle of artistic practice, meanings upon perspectives develop over and over again, creating an everlasting loop of questioning.

Paranoia strikes deep/ Into your life it will creep/ It starts…

New York based artist Talia Chetrit explores what remains hidden in the practice and mechanisms of photography. Artist Andy Hope 1930 is known for his juxtaposition of art history relationships and images of pop culture, comics or science fiction illustrations. Patrick Walsh, the artist otherwise known as JPW3, enacts alchemical transformations that turn thriftstore finds and common objects into art-making mediums. German painter Henning Strassburger examines the role of painting as a filter for the aesthetics of a mass culture. Russian artist Alexandra Sukhareva is an artist, author of processually oriented works affecting the phenomena of mutual influence of matter and cognitive gestures on each other. Philipp Timischl creates expansive multimedia installations combining personal notes from everyday life with found and self-produced materials to build narrative structures. Anna Virnich’s practice focuses on the elaboration of works that contain found fabrics and new textiles, and that the artist stretches over wooden frames to create organic, almost figurative compositions, between transparency and density. Jan Zoeller plays with the flaws in the system and turns them into the themes, protagonists and showplaces of his paintings.

Text: Marlene A. Schenk

Talia Chetrit (b. 1982, Washington DC, USA) has had solo exhibitions at Kaufmann Repetto, New York; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; Museo delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; LAXART, Los Angeles and Off Vendome, New York.

Andy Hope 1930 (b. 1963, Munich, Germany) has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin; Lomex Gallery, New York; Wiener Art Foundation, Vienna; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich and London; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain; Freud Museum, London; kestnergesellschaft, Hannover and Metro Pictures, New York.

JPW3 (b. 1981, Tallahassee, Florida, USA) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; the Sarasota Museum at Ringling College, Sarasota,  FL; MOCA Tucson, Tucson, AZ; Martos Gallery, New York; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Michael Jon Gallery, Miami; and Kunstverein Heppenheim, Heppenheim.

Henning Strassburger (b. 1983, Meißen, Germany) has had solo exhibitions at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Kunstverein Heppenheim, Heppenheim; Blain| Southern, London; Hofstra University Gallery, New York; Osnova Gallery, Moscow; Neue Galerie, Gladbeck; Nuno Centeno, Porto; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf; Kunstverein Reutlingen and Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg.

Alexandra Sukhareva (b.1983, Moscow, Russia) is an artist, author of processually oriented works affecting the phenomena of mutual influence of matter and cognitive gestures on each other. Participant of such exhibitions as “Things, words and consequences” – MMOMA, Moscow (2012), dOCUMENTA(13) – Kassel (2012), “Human Commonalities” – Vadim Sidur Museum (2016), Time, Forward! – V-A-C, Palazzo Zattere, Venice (2019), “We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams.” The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art 1905–1969 Garage Museum, Moscow (2020), Upcoming Gwangju Biennale (2021) The works are in the collections of Castello di Rivoli Museum (Turin), Tate Modern (London), as well as in private collections in Mexico, Italy, Great Britain.

Philipp Timischl (b. 1989, Graz, Austria) has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Emanuel Layr, Rom; Secession, Vienna; Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt; Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg; Vilma Gold, London; Martos Gallery, Los Angeles and Künstlerhaus, Graz.

Anna Virnich (b. 1984, Berlin, Germany) has had solo exhibitions at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; Schering Stiftung, Berlin; Drei, Cologne; Arratia Beer, Berlin; Galerie Nathalie Halgand; Kunstverein Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, and Städtische Galerie, Remscheid.

Jan Zöller (b. 1992, Haslach i. Kinzigtal, Germany) has had solo exhibitions at Meyer-Riegger, Berlin; Robert Grunenberg, Berlin; Spazio Buonasera, Torino; Orgelfabrik Karlsruhe.

The stranger’s shoes hang out of nowhere and end up on the shoulders of the picture’s characters, a pensive but mysterious image looks out of the thicket, snakes entangle everything around… Yulia Iosilzon’s characters live in a world full of joy and fun, but at the same time, full of comprehensive utopian matriarchy and woman’s power. They are multifaceted and very mysterious, as well as the female nature. This is not a mainstream feminist agenda, but a new facet of the perception of femininity and sensuality; a lightness that embraces the viewer and the artist himself.

It is no accident that the s-shaped bend first described by the British artist and theorist William Hogarth in the treatise "Analysis of beauty" also known as the Hogarth’s "line of beauty" is universally used in Yulia Iosilzon's works. Unity and diversity, energy and positive emotions all appear thanks to that very bend.

The project explores the ambivalent relations of time and the origin of primitive technicity. Geological time leaves its coordinates, making markings in deposited rocks.


Natural history demonstrates the principles of its technicality in the sophisticated evolutionary adaptations of ancient fish, and enshrines the result before our eyes and the eyes of visualizing machines. The hammerhead shark was first described in the 18th century, and its killer features have not changed significantly since then, and remain relevant as reliable attributes of the species. It is technically possible to capture these virtually unobservable changes.

The project uses CT scans of the hammerhead shark. Medical imaging, in addition to utilitarian purposes, serves to establish a close look at intimate processes from a safe distance. In this way, scenes from anatomical theaters, from the laboratory operative field, are transferred to screens, or other available media.
Instantaneous slices of computed tomography mark time in the embodied gesture of the machine, suggesting a journey of surface exploration. We are now witnessing an increased interest in the exploration of surfaces and matter; they find themselves discovered in the field of interest of art and media theorists far more often than the depths. Moreover, the demarcating work that would place bodies on one side of the divide between nature and culture, and media on the other, has already become unstable because of technology. Technology is infiltrating the body and making it available as images, in particular through media devices such as ultrasound, MRI, CAT scans and PET.

In the gallery's hall, a CNC machine specially assembled by artist Alexei Shchigalev operates; it relentlessly paints a graphic image, turning a computer tomography image into a pencil drawing. The machine can run for as long as it wants and will only stop when the program cycle is complete. The machine requires almost no maintenance and no operator's presence. From time to time, the gallery staff will remove the finished pieces and place them in the space, turning the room into a kind of research laboratory. Throughout the project, the process will be captured on multiple cameras, broadcasting from which will be available sporadically on the gallery's social networks.

Many technologies develop in stages, where each next generation of devices, instead of uncovering primordial principles of technicality, kills the previous one with a complex of innovations and optimizations, sometimes leaving no trace in the history of machines for the victim. Additive technology, machine and algorithmic art are in their infancy. The primitive g-code used in 3d printers and laser engravers will long remain the principle of control, although the usual formats of data storage and conversion often change. We have multiple axes on which the points and lines are located, we have coordinates and matrix structure mapping of analog data. These are governed by digital packets, as are the parameters of stroke intensity and counting. Like the visual organs of a hammerhead shark, this unit is not compact, but its "nervous system," prone to centralization in instrumental circuits, consumes energy sparingly. Like the deadly gesture of a shark, it makes its strokes precisely, relatively predictably, and without question. The validity and appropriateness of this gesture will not be outdone by the next generation of killer features before perhaps becoming the subject of media archaeology.

Osnova Gallery is pleased to present a new project together with Iragui Gallery. Accepting the reality of new normality and based on the principles of mutual cooperation, we are building a dialogue between two artists represented by two galleries. It seems particularly important today to move away from stereotypes that galleries are rival institutions. Cooperation within the frameworks of the exhibition "Why this moon?" is based on mutual support, which gets a significantly new sense in times of crisis.

Andrey Bogush, born 1987 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is a visual and performance artist based in Helsinki, Finland. In their work, Andrey Bogush probes the unstable nature of image production by transferring digital images onto various analogue materials. Physical forms acquire a digital structure. By printing images on industrial vinyl curtains and placing them in space, Bogush creates situations in which he seeks analogies to the life of images on the web.

Selected recent exhibitions include: Skɪz(ə)m, Ostrava, Czech Republic, ARS17, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and When Everything Is Over So We Can Discuss, at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Their work has been featured in Artforum, The Plantation Journal, and Foam Magazine, as well in the surveys Photography Is Magic, published by Aperture, and Unlocked, published by Atopos. They have been working in several residencies, including HIAP, Helsinki, Sterna Art Project, Nisyros, Greece and Art Colony, Nida, Lithuania. Bogush holds a BFA and MFA in Time and Space Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Arts Helsinki.

Nikita Alexeev, born in 1953, Moscow, is a Russian artist known for his work with conceptualism. He was one of the founders of the «Kollektivniye deistviya” (“Collective Actions”) group (1976-1983) and the founder and director of the APTART Gallery (1982-1984), whose exhibition space was located in his apartment. For a long time, he worked as an illustrator and book designer in Moscow publishing houses; since the early 1970s he has been publishing "samizdat" (underground) books and albums. In 1987-1993 he lived in France. Today he lives and works in Moscow.

Nikita Alexeev participated in many Russian and foreign exhibitions, among which were La nouva arte sovetica - una prospettiva non ufficiale (Venice, 1977), MANI Museum - 40 Moskauer Künstler (Frankfurter Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main, 1991). His works were shown at the 2nd Biennale in Cetinje, Montenegro (1994), the International Contemporary Art Biennale in Prague (2005) and at the 1st Biennale of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki (2007).

His works are in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow), Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin); The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, (New Jersey, USA); Museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Fondo Sandretti del '900 russo, (Rovereto, Italy), National Centre for Art and Culture Georges Pompidou (Paris) and others.

Osnova Gallery presents «Oxytocin» exhibition by Margo Trushina – project that rethinks human's place in the environment from the perspective of ecological discourse and the philosophy of posthumanism. Installation and objects created over the past year represent personal experience of the artist’s motherhood and suggest the viewer a critical look at the human-nature and its subsequent evolution in conditions of a technogenic future perspective.

In Margo Trushina’s works breast milk is mixed with melting glaciers, and non-organic materials continue living tissue of vegetable world, forming hybrid phenomena – ecosystems. “Until we fade” installation, transforming in time, represents a symbolic iceberg melting in gallery space and neon red cardiogram reproduces the graph of global warming over the past 100 years.

“Oxytocin” or “love hormone” is an important link between human beings and nature world, it is produced by the hypothalamus and naturally affects many areas of body and brain. Oxytocin production is stimulated during sex, childbirth and breastfeeding. Oxytocin, the hormone responsible for the sense of connection and empathy, plays a central role in all types of social connections. Recent studies in neuroscience have shown that this hormone is also produced when a person meets nature. It turned out that phenomena such as the solar eclipse, and other unusual natural phenomena, are also a catalyst for a sense of enthusiasm and complicity.

Painting is a spectacular form of art. However, its spectacularity is similar to subsoil filled with forces not associated with the spectacular.
One of the main forces of these series is the force of interval or distance. The distance should not be perceived as some universal principle, as something self-evident, as a «visionary distance» from something falsely manifested, for example.
The imagery of these series are documentaries of experiences.
“Object above neighbors’ house” (2017) is a documentation of experience of a person who saw this object above my house in summer 2017. Beside this canvas is my drawing made in 1988, where you can also recognize a certain figure “in the sky”.
It is not the work of two separate objects, between which the distance can be placed like a third content: as a rough chronology, as an instant flash of the void or even an abstract communicative node.
Distance, which I’d like to talk about, is the ability of semantic image to become. The ability of two images to assert a common sense, without having a single identity, nor time unity, nor quoting each other. Remarking that I don’t see the arbitrariness here: the images cannot be anything to become linked. The life reality has no substitution, what became a case of such a formation - has become it.
It is not the image emitting the emanation of presence that interests me, it’s the emergence that creates the self-defined procedure, requiring to be noticed.
The way the distance-emergence has been formed is reflected in my social relations. At some point, shattered the silent habit of talking about individuals as forced to isolation entities.
Going back to the thought: was it me - who drew this picture in 1988? To be more precise, was it just me?

Ian Ginsburg’s exhibition «SOVPIS» in Osnova Gallery tells about the world in which a Soviet writer existed, faced with the inability to get into the context of institution. One of the exhibition's main characters is a writer, non-conformist artist Joseph Ginsburg. System conditions doomed the Soviet writer to creative functioning in ideological and economic context of the institution, in the case of Joseph Ginsburg, in the context of the Literary Newspaper satire department. And when this writer did not get into this "chosen circle", he found himself on the periphery - he turned out to be forgotten and unaccepted.

Ian Ginsburg can be called the first Post Institutional artist in Russia. He takes a theme that not only touches upon the problem of official recognition of a person by ideological and political “machine”, but that could easily be embedded in the context of an institution: it can be a museum, or even a library, which is quite possible, given that each item and each installation at the exhibition shows not so much as it tells. This can be either a story of a single person, or a story about the Soviet life in general, or a visual representation of an aphorism. But it is very important that this exhibition took place in a gallery of contemporary art. This fact takes the concept beyond the frames of historic narration and puts it in the new space of meanings.

The exhibition space is filled with works including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, etc. Besides, there are documents, books and few objects that send us back to the epoch. Ian Ginsburg continues to change and complete the exhibition even after an official opening. And no one, even the artist himself, does not know how the exhibition will look the day it gets closed. So the exhibition lives its own life and develops its own unpredictable logic.

Etymological meaning of word «Dapple» is «differing in color». This meaning of the word tells us to focus on the dialectic of the infinite visual work. What makes dapple a dapple is not a dapple itself, but it’s difference from what surrounds it. From this point of view, art gesture exists only because of existence of other art gestures or their absence.

Dazzle, represented in one of the works, is etymologically dual: it comes from the word «to change», and it is the changing of perception, what makes a dazzle. Works of Collin Penno and Raul Diaz Reyes, presented on the exhibition, continue this constant dialectic, connecting it with the dialectic of space exploration, which in its turn creates third dialog between two dualities: form and space.

This never-ending search of relations between color, form, space and object, which are studied on the border of or inside the work, seem to fully support the idea, that lies inside the core of notion «difference», formulated by French philosopher Jacques Derrida: everything that exists is always decentralized in comparison with itself and, therefore, mostly cannot be expresses with signs. Sign system, visual, in this case, is understood by Derrida like «bundle», tangle of feelings or power lines, constantly searching for balance between the line and its dimension. Otherness of elements turns out to be the power of the only discourse, that finds its own, closest to reality, meaning in its states’ difference, numerously times uncovered and numerously times zoomed on.

Collin Penno’s work’s energy of contradiction, which might occur in comparison between three-dimensional form and colorful «formulation», is filled with most certain meaning of word «difference». The never-ending sound occurs from this contradiction.
In fact, Penno does not want and does not look for harmonization of formal grounds, because he always hesitates between the perception of complicated form and focus on extensive internal artistic concepts. The newest works of Collin Penno might be understood as final point of the longterm conceptual and experimental analysis of representational, intermedia and transmedia conventions. His approach initiates polemics on the typical perspective and breaks traditional borders between media and academic disciplines.

Сoncept of «difference» in the work of Raul Diaz Reyes can be seen in simultaneous presence of visually «blured» forms and more defined element, referring us to the postmodern architecture. Unity or, to be more specific, separation of these two elements, which find balance in the works of Reyes, generate surfaces within space limits or technical laws: the image is observed as a a figure, the image becomes its part, generating new landscapes with variable compositional opportunities. Final system of signs tells about sculptural abstractions, in which edges of form constructing play with bigger tactility, due to usage of various materials.

Domenico de Chirico, 2018

Time and again I see a recurrent dream. I am at my apartment. Everything is trivial, except the increscent anxious feeling caused by the noise of human presence in the stairway. It seems like neighbors or some other people merrily discuss household chores, but I feel that their presence is directed aggressively towards me, towards the entrance door to my apartment. Is it closed? I am checking it. Door lock is turning loosely in all directions. For some reason I am not able to close the door tight. In the appeared gap I see flickering figures. Before long and they will grab the doorknob and break into my house. Panic-stricken I turn the key and the lock crumbles in front of my eyes. While trying to close the door tighter, I feel the pressure coming from the other side. I was not mistaken - they strive to break into my house. Terror, which was all over my body until this moment, started to concentrate in my palms and fingers, engaged in the feverish keyhole locking. But nothing helps. That’s how they come from the depth: without a call, presumptuously breaking into our house, claiming on the square meters of our minds. They move furniture, change their masks, pretending they are our acquaintances and relatives.

Problems of invasion and defense strategies raised in this exhibition are detached from particular situations: they are captured in the moment when pragmatic mind with it’s requirement to give a coherent explanation still hasn’t got necessary vocabulary. And will hardly ever get it, as constellation of presented objects only exists in the space of complicated rhetorical operations. Exhibition’s topology is connected to the contradiction: subject and object of invasion are constantly changing places and their rude connection leads to the gradual loss of conceptual boundary between them. To describe this situation we methodologically address to the poetic apparatus and possibilities of rhetoric. Moreover, we think that a metaphor at it’s limit becomes even more accurate than any dictionary description. Ultimately, it can be said that I actually break into your house. And you have to do something about it.

Dmitry Khvorostov

Osnova gallery presents the debut exhibition of the young Moscow-based artist Ian Ginsburg called “The Mechanical Beetle”. The author of the project has established himself as a researcher of various models of artistic production of the 20th century. His method of work is largely related to the nonconformist Joseph Ginzburg, whose pupil and heir he is. Ian Ginsburg studies the practice of remodernism in terms of the post-conceptual state of the art today. The artist’s figurative solutions, both in multi-dimensional installations and objects, are the results of his thorough work with various types of modern archives.

In the new project “The Mechanical Beetle” the idea of ​​instability is rethought through the prism of the Moscow conceptualism movement. Unlike the Soviet practice, for which the existence of a communal structure was important, the art of Ian Ginsburg resides in an expanded social field. For the artist, there is no difference in working with a physical or digital medium, and therefore, the figurative solutions of installation in the gallery space “flicker” in a double exposure field. The project examines the post-Soviet state of capitalism in the absence of bipolar separation of the world. The image of the beetle becomes a link between the fine art of the past era and the new spirit of the immaterial production of our time.

The artist continues relating social and political issues with the formal language of her painting installations, this time pioneering a ‘hypnotic abstraction’ through the work with computer codes and repetitive circular gestures.

The central piece of the exhibition is This Certifes That that also gives the show its title. It was shown for the first time in 2016 in Popova‘s solo-exhibition After Image at Nottingham Contemporary. This Certifes That is a code-generated computer performance projected on a wall with sound. A computer in real time generates images reminiscent of Euro banknotes in denomination of 5 to 500 Euro (with convoluted and interlocking Guilloche lines and 3D scans of sculptures from The Collection. Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire, a museum and gallery in Lincoln, UK). The elements that make up the image constantly shift in potentially in nite patterns, at some point the whole sequence crashes, and then rebuilds itself. The visual stream is accompanied by a soundtrack that can be described as an algorithmic composition (sound developed in collaboration with Rebecca Lee, and inspired by Cornelius Cardew’s music experiments). A constantly morphing sonic landscape is built from different sources, including sampled audio, human and simulated voices. The computer voices with different accents read sentences which are randomly selected by the machine-world to formulate different propositions.

Yelena Popova was inspired to do this work when reading about a group of anarchists around the photographer, engineer and inventor Leon Warnerke, that attempted to crush Russia‘s (and with it the world‘s) economy at the end of the 19th century – by flooding the market with an excess of forged banknotes. So, the global market, the invisibility (and enormous effectiveness) of the financial currents, the fact that the banknotes abstract the value by certifying it, all play a role. But also, the excess of images, goods, currency, and of course, the contemporary problem of algorithm generated Tweets that influence our consumer and political choices. The hypnotic effect of the movement of the capital is formally empathized by the infinitely rotating ring of stars (in the projection) and by the repetitiveness of curvilinear gestures in the adjacent paintings.

Popova’s painting installations play against the conventions of painting display, the equilibrium of the installation can be seen as an equivalent of a (still utopian?) dream of balance of the economic powers. The paintings are made with Popova’s own medium with the layers of transparent paint creating a bodiless image, similar to the immateriality of digital images.

Yelena Popova, who is ‘Visiting Professor at Helsinki Fine Art Academy’ in 2017-18, has enjoyed several prestigious residencies in the last couple of years. She has just returned from Mallorca, where she spent a few weeks at CCA Andratx, one of the largest centers of contemporary art in the Balearic Islands as well as the rest of Europe. Before this, she was for one year „Artist in Residence“ at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Only recently one of her paintings was acquired by the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, the largest collection of modern and contemporary art by women artists in Europe.

System of simple or complex signs agreed to enable the transmission and / or concealment of messages. The convention is established between parties, a tenuous agreement with the amount of abstraction necessary for the code to be intelligible. Pre-established with parameters agreed with the intention that the essential message is not lost. Image, word, letter, number used to represent, identify and control the members of a certain set, according to the pre-established classification.

The idea of the exhibition is to work on issues inherent to the concept of the Code, presented above, seeking, from the individual research of each artist, points of contact that evidence the existence of common universes and shares that make sense in different spaces such as Brazil, Russia or any other.
Through their works, the artists propose a reflection on the elasticity of the concept and possibilities of intersections and even failures and differences of language systems.

Albano Afonso
For the exhibition Code, I present a set of works that address issues of the construction, perception and reception of the images, as well as a reflection on the creation process.

Through the use of light, movement, shadows among other elements, I propose a look beyond the work, revealing images that explore the space constructed as an illusory part of reality.

In the photos of the series Abstraction – studio, I approach the relations of the artist with his space of work through the attempt to capture / register this space. Abstract images are constructed through photographs that I perform in my studio. The photos are taken with the use of a mirror that reflects the space, the construction of the image takes place through the accumulation of clicks in the same frame / negative.

The wolf, the bird and the man, the pieces that construct the sculpture are my hands in different gestures, mounted on a mobile in perfect balance that revolve in its own axis. The hands, when illuminated, project images of a wolf, a bird and a face into space, composing a theatre of ever-changing shadows, where one form is converted into another, which never settles, constantly creating new perceptions.

In the video forger, a blacksmith hammers incessantly a circle and a square, in an imponderable attempt to shape the light.

Sandra Cinto

It may be my true calling is drawing, as I have found this method allows me a dialogue with the world - to understand it and to be a part of it. I chose a language of drawing because of its intimacy and diretor character. It is the bod, a support, and an object that can be used for a graphic action, nothing else.

My drawings demand hours of work: days, weeks, and sometimes months. It is something psychic, a ritual where repetition of the same gesture is little, fragile, and contained. I think of this process as a kind of resistance. Also, I find the relations between work, space and observer stimulating. My intention is to propose an immersive experience through color, form, and the symbolic elements associated with graphic procedure and critical reflection.

For this show I will present a new series of drawings on paper wash where the point of departure are old patterns that have been passed down thought the generations, have individual meanings and embody a multitude of people wish and prayers.

Another series of works are made by old fabric that I found in Japan, those fabrics named vintage boro produced during the Edo period to be a kimono and after the war transformed in futon, that resists until nowadays. There are so many memory and strength on those small pieces of cloth.

Carla Chaim
I work with different medias such as drawing, sculpture, video and installation. Approaching a wide range of everyday issues in the work, I bring them to the studio to think of new ways and new relations. There is a notion of control in the pieces, both through pre-established rules and in her physical movements in making a drawing or in photographs and videos. I use the body as an important tool in this process, also thinking about it as a place of conceptual discussion exploring its physical and social limits.

For the exhibition CODE, I will show a video that is an action where I use color chart cards to simulate a study in grey scale. I overlap the cards and create different combinations with the squares and rectangles of the cards. This simple action creates an atmosphere related to painting, but it is deconstructed because the video is turned to BW channel and no colors will combine better than the scale between white and black. The drawings shown here are done with different types of labels and labels paper. Here again the grey is present, but as the raw material of drawing, the graphite. Different combinations and experiments are done to create new drawing from the pre-established pattern of a label paper. In the photographs, the body acts in between the empty space. I try to create a neutral architecture where the body unites and almost disappears and fits into this aseptic space, with its white walls and floors. Here the body is trying to connect and be part of the architectural space, having to be structured by it. The works do not tell stories; they are the process itself, combining dichotomous systems: strict rules and organic physical movements.

Ding Musa
The main concern of my practice is to produce images, objects and installations to make the viewer get aware of himself as an observer, as an interpreting agent in relationship with the world and the artwork. Either in moving around an installation, or standing as a filter looking to a moving or still image, I try to provoke the spectator to be part of the work when recognizing himself as part of the representation process. Most of the time using photography, the idea of representation and its possibilities, how the photography deals with it, is also very present on the “almost abstract” images I produce. I look to put them in the thin boundary between the real recognizable world and an abstract construction that leads to another sphere, mainly stressing the impression that something is distorted/manipulated when this viewer is looking at. And in fact, we loose reference of the process of representation and responsibility of how doing it all the time. The exercise proposed is to relate to the notion of own point of view of things. The objects are also recurrent on my latest production, as drawing has also became, exploring themes like the possibilities of representing ideas and theoretical models in shapes. For the show CODE, I’m bringing 3 photographs and 2 objects.

Carlos Nunes
White code

When I was putting together several different white papers, the color of then appears to me. When you look at a separate sheet of paper we assume the white color of it, but when we see more than one white paper we begin to lose the reference of white and begin to see many other colors in the papers. White is the only color that boldly assumes other colors in itself. It can be purple, yellow, blue, green, depending on who affects it’s, that means that white is only itself when we are completely immersed in it’s universe. Because by the moment that another player comes it takes other possibilities.

We can not forget the story of the Eskimos, who lives immersed in a total white space and can distinguish among 70 different shades of white and have about 40 different names for them. White symbolizes light, is perhaps the maximum symbol of cleanliness and purity. But I am intrigued that the symbol of purity is a color that is so easily affected by its environment. Perhaps the most impure and chameleon color of all.
Looking at blank sheets of papers and finding so many other colors in them, we can think of our condition of being white peoples and than tremendously colored, as if what united us by whiteness is the diversity of colors. Maybe these is the key to the white code, the need for diversity to be a single family.

At his solo exhibition 'Overtones' at Osnova Gallery, Ilya Kukushkin presents geometric abstract paintings.

The clean, bright colors of the artist's works are not muted by the overlapping halftones. Kukushkin uses saturated but light, transparent colors - you can see the texture of the paper or canvas behind them. He does not break works into plans and fills them completely with forms, leaving no free space.

The artist's works exist beyond time and space and are devoid of subtext and symbolism - they are improvisations in which he is primarily interested in purity of color, clarity and geometric precision of lines, the interaction of forms and shades among themselves and their impact on the viewer.

Ilya Kukushkin graduated from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art.

The works by Andrey Bogush and Bogdan Ablozhnyy reflect fear and anxiety that are constantly following people nowadays and explore the reasons behind these feelings. Andrey Bogush’s endless project Proposals captures images in their transition state when they already are in a new condition but the works are not fulfilled and they remain to be proposals for something different. Now he counterposes the static character of his photograph and painting to the transformation embodied in printed proposals; he questions the difference between ideas incarnated on the surface and the ones that are put in the core of the thing. Mysterious concatenation of circumstances is the one of the recurrent motifs in Bogdan Ablozhnyy’s works.

Numerous coincidences magnify the suspense created by artist’s installations. He poses a question of the relationship between individual and the State by printing F-scale test and Pasolini-inspired unfinished novel on flags as two contradicting manifests and writing a poem on his experience of crossing the border. While Andrey focuses on images, Bogdan works with text – but both suggest to rethink the current moment of life.

Untitled en copyIn his practice Bogdan Ablozhnyy (1994) references writings, video installations, performances and sculpture as well as such specific genres as situation, black labour and unfinished novel, allowing for narrative and formal contradiction simultaneously encourage and impede identification. Bogdan Ablozhnyy lives and works in Saint Petersburg and Frankfurt am Main.

In his work, Andrey Bogush (b. 1987) probes the unstable nature of image production by transferring digital images onto various analogue materials. His large-scale installations have been exhibited at the The Finnish Museum of Photography, NRW Forum in Düsseldorf and the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. He lives and works between Helsinki and Berlin.

Blue.Seventeen is a post-apocalyptic landscape that exists in the world “without us”: on the planet where we still exist as a species, leave traces — however, in this very moment we’ve stepped back, and from the active agents turned into spectators, detached from the action itself. Imagine the flight mode in a computer game, when one’s role of a player is replaced by the position of a scenery watcher: the one who got stuck in the moment, when the so-called present has not yet fallen into the past in order to free the space for some upcoming future. Here the linear passage of time is replaced by the relationship of co-composition amongst things and events, which are intentionally deprived of duration — the parameter that is inherently human-specific, as it is imposed by human determinism. Here the processes of production and consumption once reached its critical speed; and then “everything was so slow that even death became impossible, because dying itself was extended over such a long periods that it has become unbearable and no one wanted to die anymore.” (Neelova, 2016)

The works by artists Olga Grotova, Nika Neelova and Yelena Popova explore the materiality of this speculative space and experiment with the possibilities of art production and consumption within it. The time-based works by Olga Grotova deconstruct the linear vision of history — by exposing the artifice of the very idea of time as continuum. Her paintings, created by a means of screen-printing and digital post-production, reveal the transformation of a real artistic gesture into a fictional one. In so doing they question the notion of memory of the past, and seek the possibility of memory of the future. Reflecting the utopian envision of art production as anti-production, the paintings and ceramics by Yelena Popova are made from the materials that are “borrowed” from our planet, recycled, and used again: ashes, soil and organic colour pigments. Presented as a part of one exposition, the works exist as one living organism, spreading and occupying the room. Finally, the sculptural works by Neelova act as the ready-mades of this world without us. In graceful silence they are expecting the spectator of the future — the one who is distanced from the present moment for the minimal amount of time, required to deny the comforting reality produced by the framework of human’s eye and life-span.

— by Sasha Burkhanova, 2017.

Andrey cannot imagine himself as an artist without a computer or a digital camera. Their work is in the digital and computer plane. They work with a photograph, which he transforms into something new. It is no longer a photograph, it does not turn into a collage. Their work is between sculpture and image.

"I take an image, a photograph that I took, and then I put layers on it. I change it. And a transformation happens to it. My work is about surfaces and references. It's not about meaning, it's about the very work that has been done with the photograph. It's more of a negative field than a positive one."

In 2015 their work has already been in the Tate in London, Kunsthalle in Helsinki, Einar Jonsson Museum in Reykjavik, PRADA SS 2015 advertising campaign, galleries in Zurich, in Milan.

Osnova Gallery hosted Andrey Bogush's first solo exhibition in Russia.