Aliaksandr NEKRASHEVICH / Gods and Heroes
18.11-10.12.2011
"Gods and Heroes" by Aliaksandr Nekrashevich
Between the Art of the Past and Future, Between the Original and Imagination…
Do we think how exactly the understanding of art changes together with the development of the technologies, with changes of world geography and globalisation processes?
The world becomes different. The means and tasks of art become different.
Aliaksandr Nekrashevich's exhibition "Gods and Heroes" demonstrates the changes of the attitude to those bases which throughout the centuries have formed a well-known tradition of classical art. It is the fixing of the moment of change that makes A. Nekrashevich's exhibition modern because it opens the potential of the modern art which is free from strict aesthetic hierarchy.
Easily distinguished images of A. Nekrashevich's works performed in the technique of aerography on aluminium surface, covered by automobile lacquer, force to start thinking on how much our perception of the world is dependent on that system of images which exists around us and dominates in the society.
With the appearance of means of replication, valuable paintings - high samples of art - were replicated in large quantities. Due to this fact democratisation of art has happened. Now Mona Lisa and Hercules as well as heroes and heroines of mass culture, Batman and Madonna, can hang in any apartment on equal terms. All these images, understood as images, form our subjective perception of the world. Now everyone can joyfully distinguish the known: a child, an adult, an intellectual and a passer-by.
On the one hand, A. Nekrashevich reproduces fragments (heads) of the originals of La Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci ("Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo", 1503-1505), Aphrodites by Sandro Botticelli ("The Birth of Venus", approx. 1485), Heracles Farnese (the Roman work of the Empire epoch of the IV c. BC), Gargoyles that decorate a medieval temple, etc. that are all kept in museums. Thereby he indicates the presence of the cult of lofty classical art: after all we know that it exists and is valuable.
On the other hand, the artist repeats the images of a series of famous comics by Marvel Company (marvel means miracle): "The Incredible Hulk" and facsimiles of media images of Madonna, Ksiusha Sobchak, Harry Potter, etc. It indicates the connection of the art of the past and the present, and the influence of mass culture on art.
As a result A. Nekrashevich gets a series of works-clich?s, "images-for-repetitions" or dream-like images (as in Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams"), repeating a certain symptom or effect. Walter Benjamin and Hànnah Arendt could have named it vita activà effect, an active life, resisting to a rational order of production; a life that challenges a form.
The artist Nekrashevich does not produce new images unlike artists of the past. He makes visible that in the world of modern media images (TV, cinema and the Internet) any of them which is available in the form of an image can be reproduced. However reproduction does not mean secondariness because it leans against the special relation of the artist with original products of "high art" and now the viewers have a chance to enter it.
Maria Khruschak,
Translated by Volha Hapeyeva
For accreditation and additional information ask Andrey Zheleznyak (093) 774 74 80
