Press release

Olga & Oleg Tatarintsev Simulation of Normality 26 May - 10 September, 2016

Vernissage: Thursday, 26 May 2016, 6 p.m.

at Nadja Brykina Gallery, Zurich

The Nadja Brykina Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition by Moscow duo Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev – artists well known for their innovative work with materials and biting social commentary.

The ground floor of the gallery will be taken over by five large-scale projects, created over the past five years as a result of joint and independent work. In their recent work, Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev have arrived at a recognisable plastic language that derives its form from the legacy of postminimalism, and its philosophy of colour from the efforts of the Russian avant-garde. This exhibition will be the artists’ first major project in Switzerland since their retrospective at the RappazMuseum, Basel, 2013.

Olga Tatarintseva’s geometric abstractions are a rendition of musical harmony and dissonance in the visual arts. Olga uses the technique of painting on plexiglass which, as with all of the duo’s work, conceals a time consuming work process behind its flawless surface gloss. Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev have often combined painting and ceramics in their more spectacular and expressive installations of recent years. Through the use of laconic and succinct plastic language, the large-scale projects “No comment” (2013) and “Instead of music” (2015) refer to social and memorial issues. The installation “Instead of music”, for example, simulates the scene after a shooting, with the artwork playing the role of the condemned: the area around the bullet-riddled geometric abstraction is littered with empty cartridge shells. The installation is accompanied by an extensive research project on the official criticism of formalism in art in the USSR, and the victims of the subsequent terror. Another central issue in the duo’s work is the childhood & adolescence of the next generation amidst the realities of our modern age - with its acute militarisation and ubiquitous, obsessive fears. The balls and stacking rings in Olga and Oleg’s installations are grimly reminiscent of children’s toys: a sense of fragility is concealed behind the impressive dimensions and

flawless finish. The artists’ installations are built on expressive metaphors and brightly coloured imagery, successfully simulating the ‘normality’ of today, with all its brutal pressures and latent instability. Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. 2015.

Biography

Olga Tatarintseva (b.1967, Stara Ushytsia, Ukraine) and Oleg Tatarintsev (b.1966, Baku, Azerbaijan). Graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts in 1992. Since 1993 they have been living in Moscow.

Participated in special projects 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009, 2011, 2013); XXIII International Biennial of Vallauris – Contemporary Creation and Ceramic, France (2014); 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (2015). Main solo exhibitions: RappazMuseum, Basel, (2013); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011); pop/off/art Gallery, Moscow (2009, 2013, 2015); Viartis Gallery, Halle, Germany (2004); Neohaus Gallery, Moscow (2002); A-3 Gallery, Moscow (2000).

Participated in group exhibitions in Russia, France, Switzerland, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Chile, and the USA. Works in public collections: Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg); RappazMuseum (Basel); Magnelli Museum and Ceramics Museum (Vallauris, France); Moscow Museum of Modern Art; National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow); Novy Museum (St. Petersburg); Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts; All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts (Moscow); National Museum of Ukrainian Pottery (Opishnya); Elagin Island Palace-Museum of Russian Decorative and Applied Art and Interior Design 18th-20th centuries (St. Petersburg); Stieglitz Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts (St. Petersburg); Stroganov Museum of the Academy of Arts (Moscow); Voloshin Museum (Koktebel, Crimea);

Lviv National Academy of Arts; and in many private collections all over the world.

Explications to the five projects:

Sound At first glance, the series of paintings entitled “Sound. The line of sound. The form of sound” are a classic example of geometric abstraction – the laconic colour scheme, the rigid concreteness of the image (grid) – but when examined more closely, it gives rise to a complex set of associations.

On the one hand it is reminiscent of a person’s desire for purity, albeit unattainable, the ascent to the top; in others words, that which forms the basis of abstract thinking. A departure into abstract art is an attempt to be saved from the negativity encroaching on our lives from all sides. And what could be more abstract than music, than sound? Indeed, the even, rhythmic pulse, the emotion of the colourful monochrome segments dulled by monotony, the lack of any pronounced movement. This all refers to a post-minimalist musical composition and, at the same time, to archaic ritual sound production. In its own way, it is an appeal to the deeply-hidden structures of consciousness. A desire to invoke a sense of the sublime through ‘simple’ beauty. The black horizontal line cutting the canvas in half can be perceived as both a metaphor for sound per se, a kind of great-sound, and as the sound of one long uninterrupted note trying to prevent the ascent of the vertical, thereby maintaining the balance, if you will, of the heavenly and the earthly. On the other hand, the painted grids can be associated (in the spirit of Peter Halley) with the structure of modern society, where the coloured verticals, the rectangles are ‘social units’ seeking to bring structure to the chaos of the world around them. Meanwhile, the horizontal division represents communication networks that both unite and introduce an element of conflict.

Olga Tatarintseva. Sound. Acrylic on canvas, 190x560, 2009-2010. The limitation of sound The series on acrylic plastic titled “The Limitation of Sound” develops the motif contained in the series “Line of Sound” as a mere possibility, a potentiality. The works in this series are particularly conflictual. Flat surfaces evenly lined with multi-coloured vertical strips, crossed in all directions by wide monochromatic ‘ribbons’ that seem to be concealing the original, openly resonant and colourful motif behind its bars. Constituting abstract art in its purest form, the series nevertheless conveys the spirit of the time - the middle of the 21st century’s second decade. The world is in economic crisis, there are alternating political conflicts, local wars and endless negotiations. „The Limitation of Sound“ is a limitation of the harmony: the hardly worked out sound, is now brought in turbulence. Extremely expressive works on shiny acrylic plastic convey protest and deep desperation.

Olga Tatarintseva. Limitation of Sound No. 1, No. 2, No. 5, No. 6. Acrylic on plexiglas, each 100 x 100, 2015.

Instead of music

The sentiments that are becoming increasingly common today, both in terms of the government’s attitude to contemporary art and within the artistic community itself, are reminiscent of the situation in the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1930s, when a crusade was launched from the upper tribunes against “formalism in art alien to the people”. It is also possible to pinpoint the exact date that the campaign began – 28 January 1936. This was the day that the country’s leading newspaper, Pravda, printed a damning article entitled “Muddle Instead of Music” directed against Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The initiative was taken up and the Soviet press became littered with articles criticising formalism in literature, ballet, painting, the graphic arts, architecture, and even chess... Then, a short time later, came the ‘killer’ article... Eighty years have passed, yet Russian society as a whole, despite an external shift in the reference points guiding its development, remains true to its national mentality. Today, contemporary art as an instrument of social critique is no longer welcomed. It has fallen out of favour and is literally under suspicion. So, formalism, along with the whole ‘contemporary art’ project, is once again in the firing line.

Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev installation “Instead of music” deals with all these issues, its very name a reference to Pravda’s infamous article. The semantic centre of the installation is a work from “The Limitation of Sound”, a series of paintings on acrylic plastic. Here, however, the ‘yellow sound’ is not just being restricted by the overlapping black strips, but is literally being shot – the work is riddled with bullet holes. Glittering shapes symbolising empty cartridge shells cover the floor of the gallery and names flash up on a black screen – Drevin, Ermolaeva, Klutsis – 152 surnames of executed artists. The installation’s polystylism is enhanced by printouts on the walls of the already mentioned articles denouncing formalism in art that filled the pages of Soviet newspapers, as well as several passages from modern-day publications. And what about Dmitry Shostakovich? Well, he is also here, and not just through the work’s reference to the article “Muddle Instead of Music”, but through the music itself: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Act IV. Scene 9. A temporary convict camp. Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. Instead of music. Chamotte, glaze, acrylic on plexiglass, 2015. No comment

In mid-2000s Russia, there was an attempt to rethink the formalist approach to art and to transfer it to a register where it could comment directly on social and political issues. In the installation “No comment”, the artists violate the meaningful silence of geometric forms, lift the ban on associativity and external contextuality, and shift to imagery based on an interaction between the abstract and the concrete, forcing the forms ‘to speak’. Directly on the wall of the gallery is an enormous, sprawling, black silhouette of a diving fighter jet, the reflective surface of which seems to be spitting out brightly-coloured volleys of children’s stacking rings into the whiteness, which bristle from the wall like projectiles.

“Army” and “Children” are the two themes displayed by the artists here on one wall. Any additional commentary would be unnecessary.

Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. No comment. Chamotte, glaze, polystyrene. 430x1250x56, 2013.

Simulation of normality

Five large, brightly coloured ceramic balls on a square base – a metaphor for childhood. A ‘baby box’ enclosed by a circular palisade of real knives driven into the ‘ground’. The installation has, at a minimum, two levels of interpretation. It is no longer known who first uttered the phrase, “Children are our future!”, but humanity has long recognised it as fact in both the narrow and the broad sense. We are concerned about the many dangers that await our children: drugs, violence, crime, sexual perversion, and even the negative influence of other cultures. The call to “Protect our children!” is not only just heard often, but is also supported by law.

Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev. Simulation of normality. Chamotte, glaze, knives, 85x250x250, 2014.

The knives here are a symbol of that protection. It is well-known that knives have a ritual significance in many cultures. Knives were placed in cradles, for example, to ‘protect’ the child. In the context of the issues raised by Olga and Oleg Tatarintsev in this installation, they signify that over time, the adults put up protective wards around their children’s playground, raised out of fear of the world surrounding them, in hostility to the otherness of their neighbours and to everything that is foreign to their ‘sandpit’. Their playgrounds will be bristling with blades towards the outside world. It is instinctive to protect one’s children, but protecting them by isolation behind an iron curtain means to raise them in a ‘cold war’ situation that could one day escalate, i.e. to simulate

normality. Where is the truth? And is it possible to see the Truth despite a limitation, without having a large horizon of possible points of view, although it was meant for our welfare? What here is simulated and what is manipulated?

Nadja Brykina Gallery Sihlstrasse 91 8001 Zürich T +41 44 222 05 05 Email: [email protected] www.brykina.com

Opening hours: Thursday - Friday 1-6 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. or by appointment

Curator: Mascha Brouver, T +41 79 231 44 94, Email: [email protected]