The PERMM Museum of Modern Art continues its strategy of working with the collections of the largest Russian galleries and presents the premiere of the exhibition "Andrey Krasulin. Beginnings", created jointly with the Moscow partner pop/off/art gallery.
Andrey Krasulin. Plant. 1971. Bronze
Andrey Krasulin is a Russian and Soviet sculptor, minimalist artist, whose work is difficult to attribute to a certain direction. The project, implemented under the curatorship of Arseniy Sergeev, is designed to show the basics and structure of Krasulin's artistic language from early sculptures of the 60s to later paintings and graphics.
The exposition will unfold on three floors of the museum and will unite more than 700 works that the author thought of as experiments, trials and discoveries — these are pure representations, devoid of guile, the artist's reflections on topics of an essential order. The name of the exhibition is "Andrey Krasulin. Beginnings" is connected with the strategy of the artist's work, who understands himself as a researcher who is in search of the first principles, the "first symbols" of artistic utterance. This is a conversation about the fundamental things on which art is built, an observation of abstraction at the moment of its transformation into a symbol.
The works presented at the exhibition became the basis of Krasulin's monumental works, which he created throughout his life. Eight of them will be part of the exhibition and will be shown in the format of video projections — the fountain "Tree of Life" in front of the academic building of the Institute of Advanced Medical Training (Moscow, 1980), the tombstone to Vysotsky (Moscow, 1981), a composition in the walls of the Cranach Foundation building in Wittenberg (Germany, 1997) and others.
"Andrey Krasulin's main intention is to be extremely clear and concise. All his works are solid, complete and powerful, and at the same time made just as much as it is necessary in order to express the idea. Throughout his life, he consistently practices a stingy and strict method of creating works of art, where simple basic gestures and forms turn into symbols, and symbols of a sacred nature. The radiance of simplicity is exactly what we would like to show in this exhibition," says Arseniy Sergeyev.
The architectural concept of the exhibition, developed by Arseniy Sergeev, is a metaphor for the artist's workshop. A special element of the exhibition will be racks, shelves, machine tools, work tables — the structures necessary for the artist to create a work of art. The tonal and light solution of the exposition is a metaphor for the different states of illumination in the workshop, where something is always hiding in the shadows, and something turns out to be in the brightest possible light. All this invites the viewer to become a participant in the artistic process and observe how the artist thinks.
