Egor Koshelev
THE SECOND TIME

 

The artist Egor Koshelev, an attentive observer and ironic commentator of contemporary culture, has more work to do — the surrounding reality demands more and more explanations. Following the large-scale exposition “Artist`s Gestalt or Sudden Retrospective”, a joint project of MMOMA and OVCHARENKO, another Koshelev solo exhibition “Second Time” opens at the same, speak not only about the demand for the author, but also about the exact hit of the artist’s works on the viewer confused by the current events.

The works presented at the exhibition were not included in the museum exposition on Gogolevsky Boulevard and were left standing in the total installation "Storage". Egor Koshelev intended to dispose of his early work in it, but in the end the "Storage" corpus was replenished with works unnecessary for the retrospective. The exposition at Neglinnaya turned out to be a kind of homage to the "Salon of the Rejected".

"Salon of the Rejected" was an exhibition held in 1863 in parallel to the official Paris Salon, one of France's most prestigious art showcases. The jury selecting the paintings was geared towards the academic taste of the École des Beaux-Arts and rejected 3,000 paintings out of 5,000 submitted, including works by artists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir and Sisley. A scandal broke out, the exhibition was visited by Emperor Napoleon III and he ordered the "rejected" paintings to be hung in another part of the Palais de l'Industrie. "Salon of the Rejected" aroused much more viewer interest than the official exhibition.

In this unexpected and unforeseen way, "The Second Time" continues the dialogue with artists of the past, which is led by Yegor Koshelev. Traditionally, the second half is decisive, the most spectacular and exciting. The graphic sheets from the "Remains" series represent Moscow not in its most glorious form, but they speak about the state of the city and its inhabitants in a more than expressive way. The pictorial canvas "Pajama Party Chronicles. Sawing" may confuse the overly impressionable viewer, who is frightened to confuse the dark red paint "kraplak" with blood clots and does not understand in what place the unfortunate Russian borzaya, dressed in a scarlet horsecloth of suspicious shape, is being sawed. The work "My Fussy World" from the distant 2008, in which the artist depicted the triumph of evil in modern life, turned out to be excessively poignant today. Seemingly random works, appearing in the same exhibition space, form a single statement - but what kind of statement, as in the case of the Salon of the Departed, the viewer will have to guess.

Egor Koshelev about the exhibition: "I have had to act as a curator and sometimes even as a forced censor of my own art. It happens like this — in the process of working on a new project, some part of the works, and from among the important, even especially dear to the artist, are excluded from the final exhibition by the artist himself. There are various reasons for this — they do not fit the size, they turned out to be too bright for the general color scheme of the exhibition (for example, lead-grey), they fell out of time and space, changed color in fright and merged with the environment, preserving what can still be kept alive. In general, there are a lot of reasons, but the result is the same - the way of paintings to the viewer is closed. So they accumulate in workshops and storerooms, separated, forgotten, faded and shattered by the realization of their cultural irrelevance, quietly putting their strained canvas backs in support of each other. But it happens that even the harshest critic of his own work will ask in his heart: "Am I not the father of these lacquer-painted creatures? Can't the fruits of my labors, piled up on dusty shelves, come to light, if only because they contain all the joys, delights, doubts and sorrows that I have lived with for so long? So why not give them such an opportunity?" Let these sufferers, rejects and outcasts fill the gallery walls. And perhaps, seeing these hitherto hidden things in their entirety, the viewer will say — and they make sense!" V