The New Academy. St. Petersburg

November 2, 2011 – January 29, 2012

Venue: Ekaterina Cultural Foundation

Project idea: Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin
Exhibition Concept: Arkady Ippolitov
Curators: Arkady Ippolitov, Alexandra Khartonova

The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation continues to show the exhibition program dedicated to the Russian art of the latter half of the 20th century - the beginning of the 21st century. In recent times, such projects as "Field of Action" and "Authorized for Export from the USSR..." were held on the initiative of and with the support of the Foundation. The projects demonstrated and investigated such phenomena in the Russian art life of the 1960’s through 1980’s as Moscow non-conformist art and Moscow Conceptualist Scholl.

From November 2011 to January 2012 as a part of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Foundation halls will display one more project dedicated to one of the most interesting artistic trends that developed in Saint Petersburg in the 1990s.

The Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin founders described the project by noting the following:
"The idea of showing an exhibition dedicated to Timur Novikov's New Academy of Fine Arts at our Foundation first occurred to us several years ago. Given the processes unfolding in Russian and world-wide international art today - return to the painting, sculpture, objects, traditional materials, "completeness" of the artwork, technical perfection and beauty - the principals shared by radical and "non-spectacular" artists, among others, such an exhibition seems to be of special interest and significance."

For the first time the exhibition will bring together the artworks and joint projects of fourteen artists – creators of the New Academy and its active participants.

The project, including publication of a voluminous catalog, can be described as a type of ceremonial procession of the St. Petersburg Neo-Academism – the exposition takes place in the halls of the building designed in the neo-classical style by St. Petersburg architect Leonty Benois. The exhibition will show approximately 200 works assembled from 40 Russian collections, many of which the Moscow audience will see for the first time.

A separate hall of the exhibition is devoted to a peculiar manifesto of neo-academism - the 1994 year project "Passiones Luci" or "The Golden Ass," based on Apuleius's novel "Metamorphoses." The hall will expose costumes and the novel illustrations created in a revolutionary for that time technique of computer graphics technology as well as the other works thematically related to the project. (Authors: K. Goncharov, A. Sokolov, O. Tobreluts, E. Andreeva).

On display will also be the famous videos, created by Neo-Academism artists, including "Manifest of Neo-Academism" and "Golden Ratio."

Having conceived the project, the organizers tried to portray the Neo-Academism as proclaimed by Timur  Novikov in all its diversity since the Academy had been founded, the first manifestos,  the witty and ironical play with antiquity, experiments incorporating the images and forms of classical sculpture and painting in the context of modern day, up to the artists’ transition to what they described as "New Seriousness".

One of the most interesting and challenging tasks was to show the uniqueness and originality of each of the participants in the context of the overall direction of development of the New Academy, which Professor of The New Academy of Fine Arts Olga Tobreluts cleverly described as "Archaic – Classical Period – Hellenism".

List of Artists: 
Georgy Guryanov, Denis Egelsky, Viktor Kuznetsov, Irena Kuksenaite, Stanislav Makarov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Oleg Maslov & Viktor Kuznetsov, Bella Matveeva, Andrei Medvedev, Timur Novikov, Egor Ostrov, Julia Strausova, Olga Tobreluts, Andrei Khlobystin

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