Pavel Pepperstein. The Human as a Frame For the Landscape

“Introduced to the circle of Moscow Conceptualists as a child, since the beginning of his career Pepperstein has been one of the most prolific mythmakers in Russian contemporary art. He is an inventor of systems, universes, languages, cities, and political projects. Pepperstein’s solo exhibition at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art reviews the key myths he has created since the 1970s: from imaginary countries for which he has developed detailed maps and national symbols to ecstatic or, on the contrary, ultra-logical visions of the future; from religions, cults, beliefs, and rituals to alternative realities that exist in parallel dimensions and modalities. ” (1)

Following the artist’s wish, the installation not only completely isolates the art from the actual building of the museum, but also blurs the boundaries between the traditional elements of an exhibition room. The walls, ceiling and floor softly merge, making it difficult to perceive real depth and height of each space. Paintings float in “white” environments of undefined geometries. The notion of the “white cube”, i.e. the default condition for showing art, is taken here to the extreme. The space is just ultra-white. The purity of the capsules is occasionally interrupted by intrusions of the building: columns clad with colorful flower fabrics dialogue with the flower patterns in the paintings, forming a playful resonance between the art and architecture.
The sequence of ethereal capsules is interrupted by the monumental Summit Room, exhibiting flags of an imaginary G8 summit contaminated with cheerful flower patterns. Next to the summit, a dark room, entirely covered with leaves, solemnly preserves the mannequins of a sleeping Lenin and a young girl within a diamond-shaped coffin, reconstructed by GRACE from the sketches of Konstantin Melnikov.

(1) From the curatorial text by E. Inozemtseva