Sympathetic Interactions

In Ivanovo, as part of the "First Factory of the Avant-Garde" festival, the exhibition "Sympathetic Interactions" has opened.

The exhibition features over 100 works by masters of Soviet unofficial art from the AZ Museum collection and contemporary artists — Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Mikhail Shemyakin, Oleg Tselkov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Grisha Bruskin, Francisco Infante, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Pavel Otdelnov, Irina Korina, Petr Bely, Timofey Radya, Sergei Denisov, Anna Martynenko, Klava Kolibaba, Anya Miroshnichenko, Andrei Rudyev, Sveta Isaeva, Ivan Khimin, and others. The project curator is artist and art historian Alexander Dashevsky.

Works of art from the 1960s–2020s are united by an intricate conceptual framework: the project is built on the principle of a mirror, where one era seeks reflections of its hopes, fears, dead ends, and despair in the experience of a long-past period. On this exhibition, the Renaissance becomes such a twin-interlocutor of modernity — a stage of prolonged social transformation that gave rise to today's contradiction-torn world. Like people today, those of the Renaissance created the future while thinking they were preserving the truths and achievements of the past, oscillating between the roles of innovators and inheritors, experimenters and guardians.

Renaissance medicine inherited from antiquity the idea that all processes occurring in the body depend on the balance of four humoral substances — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The humors within a person are reflections of the elements that make up the cosmos: earth, fire, water, and air. A disruption of balance in the body affects the entire world. The exhibition visitor, like a Renaissance physician, will follow the fluid-elements through the body of the patient-universe.

The curator of "Sympathetic Interactions," Alexander Dashevsky, has created a space of historical echoes and parallels using works by masters of Soviet unofficial art and contemporary artists in the city of Constructivism — Ivanovo.

Natalia Opaleva, Director General of AZ Museum:
"The new exhibition in Ivanovo is interesting above all for its unexpected and bold dialogue with the Renaissance era. Alexander Dashevsky, a renowned artist and project curator, enthusiastically immersed himself in the times of great painters and scientists, in an era that gave birth to the 'universal man' — searching, bold, comprehending the world through experience and asserting that man is the measure of all things. Humanism as a new worldview became the main distinguishing feature of the Renaissance, leading to the creation of new genres in literature, music, painting, and poetry. Many centuries have passed since then, but people still ask the same questions and try to find answers to them."

Exhibition Structure
The exhibition is divided into four sections, each metaphorically connected to one of the humors. Each section in turn consists of three thematic categories that flow seamlessly into one another. Moving through the organism of the exhibition, the viewer observes the eclectic logic of relationships between works.

Alexander Dashevsky, exhibition curator:
"'Sympathetic Interactions' is a major project about anxiety, hope, and how the desire to disenchant the future enchants the past. The connections between works, the division of material, and the imagery are organized according to ideas about the structure of the world from the arsenal of Renaissance magic. The Renaissance was a time not only — and not so much — of bold innovators, but a period of competition, re-appropriation, and reinvention of traditions, a time when conservative tools and rhetoric created conditions that forced thought and knowledge to move toward the unknown. The feeling of an end, crisis, dead end, danger involuntarily focuses attention on the source, the beginning, the point of origin. The Renaissance is one of the eras that modernity has designated as its progenitor. The figure of the humanist, speaking decisively and confident in their ability to judge politics, religion, planetary motion, and pharmacology, proves very much in demand when you trust neither the preacher, nor your own doctor, nor your ability to understand their machinations. Modernity, entering into sympathetic interactions with the history of knowledge of the Renaissance era, illuminates unexpected judgments, strange notions, amazing disputes and contradictions, while simultaneously telling about itself. At this exhibition, the viewer will enjoy much reading and training of poetic vision — the exposition is full of visual paradoxes and rhymes."

Exhibition Sections
The first humor-section, "Letter and Sound," is dedicated to questions of language — knowledge of foreign and ancient languages; translation work, which was extremely important for Renaissance humanists; numerology and esoteric treatises, as well as communication with angels that occupied people of that era. Here, works by Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, Dmitry Plavinsky, Petr Bely, Vladimir Abikh, Pavel Otdelnov, Vladimir Kozin, and others will be presented.

The second section — "Exact and Demonstrative Magic" — tells about natural magic, astronomy and astrology, and the connection between mathematics, music, the movement of stars, and harmonic world order. In this humor, one can see works by Andrei Rudyev, Dima Filippov, Anna Martynenko, Alexander Morozov, Denis Patrakeev, Francisco Infante, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nasedkin, Grisha Bruskin.

The third section — "Medicine" — examines the structure of this field in the Renaissance era through works by Klava Kolibaba, Valery Grikovsky, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Ernst Neizvestny, Natalia Turnova, Oleg Tselkov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Malle Leis, Ekaterina Isaeva, Sergei Denisov, and others.

The fourth humor — Primus et Novissimus — returns to the theme of constancy and change. Artists: Vladimir Kustov, Vika Begalskaya and Alexander Vilkin, Alena Zhandarova, Anya Miroshnichenko, Sergei Tikhonov, "Semichov — Kuzmin," Vladimir Yankilevsky, Sergei Kolosov, Petr Dyakov, Petr Belenok, Timofey Radya, Oscar Rabin, Sergei Tikhonov, and others.

The project is dedicated to the memory of AZ Museum researcher Sergei Solovyov, whose range of scholarly and artistic interests encompassed the Renaissance, the avant-garde, unofficial art of the 1960s, and the contemporary. A native of Ivanovo, he maintained close personal and professional ties with the city throughout his life.

The exhibition will be open until March 10, 2023.

The contemporary art festival "First Factory of the Avant-Garde" has been held annually in Ivanovo since 2018. It is a showcase of current art in various directions: art projects, theater, literature, music, cinema, choreography, photography, and much more. The main idea of the festival is to comprehend experiments in different areas of contemporary art through the prism of avant-garde art traditions that actively developed in Ivanovo in the 1920s–1930s. Guests and participants of the festival in various years have included Nadezhda Vasilyeva, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Martynov, Evgeny Vodolazkin, Alexander Gronsky, Olga Florenskaya, Roma Uvarov, Nastasya Khrushcheva, and others. Among the curators of art projects have been Sergei Solovyov, Alisa Savitskaya, Katya-Anna Taguti, and Dmitry Kavarga.

Address: "Museum and Exhibition Center," Ivanovo Region, Ivanovo, 29 Sovetskaya St.

Project team:

Director General of AZ Museum and AZ/ART Natalia Opaleva

Project Curator Alexander Dashevsky

Exhibition Architecture MISH studio (Mikhail Maslov, Marina Artamonycheva)