Exhibition dates: 10 February - 7 March 2010

Olyvia Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, sculptures and light boxes by emerging and established Russian artists.

Alexander Ponomarev

Alexander Ponomarev, whose grandfather was a Hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, graduated from the USSR Nautical Engineering College in 1979. His subsequent career as a seaman left an indelible mark on his artistic output, dominated by epic aquatic installations, none more spectacular than Maya: The Lost Island (2000) when, with the help of the Russian fleet and an army of smoke canisters, Ponomarev provoked the "disappearance" of an island in the Barents Sea. His psychedelic submarine surfaced in the Tuileries Gardens during Paris FIAC in 2006, then in Moscow during the 2007 Biennale. Ponomarev also starred at both Lisbon's Expo-98 and the hugely popular Russian Pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale, before enjoying his first New York solo show in May 2008. Shortly after erecting a 100-foot periscope beneath the dome of a Baroque church in Paris during the 2007 Festival d'Automne, he was named Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur by France's Minister of Culture. Ponomarev took part in several exhibitions organized by RNA in London, including VIBE and Sub Zero. His new submarine project entitled SubTiziano was shown as a collateral event at 53rd Venice Biennale.

Sergey Anufriev

Sergey Anufriev was born in 1964 in a family of artists and nonconformists of Moscow origin in Odessa. The cultural movement of the 1960’s turned Odessa into the center of the modern art world of the southern Russia and the only hearth and home of unofficial culture in Ukraine. These people brought out a new wave of modern art. Lack of an audience forced its young participants to move to Moscow, thus establishing a trend for future generations of young modern artists in Odessa.
This creative potential was born in an atmosphere in which Odessa was connected to many islands of a “second culture”  (Moscow, Leningrad, the Baltic states, the Crimea, Caucasia, Central Asia, and Siberia).  Sergey Anufriev realized this potential when he moved to Moscow and started his individual career in the circle of conceptualists.

Member of the APTART, then head of the Moscow Avant-garde club, co-founder of Inspection Medical Hermeneutics togerther with Pavel Peppershtein and Yuri Leiderman, co-founder of Cloudy Comission, friends and partners with Afrika and Timur Novikov, Anufriev is truly a legendary figure in Russian art. Not just a painter, but a philosopher, writer, musician. His newest artistic concept, Patternism, first introduced in London at the VIBE show, obviously has its roots in conceptual traditions of Moscow and Odessa.

Hermes Zygott

Hermes Zygott is a painter, musician, performer, creator of installations, and poet. Performance plays a crucial role in his creative work, which includes stage plays, music, poetry, painting and dance. Hermes was conceived in Mongolia in 1964, but born in St Petersburg. In 1992 he left for Western Europe, then moved to America, studying art with John Boldesary, Vadim Grinberg, George Seagull and Maximilian Shell. His first private exhibitions were held in America. In the mid-90s, in Los Angeles, together with Yuri Balashov, he conceived the theory of noart that was later to be embodied in his canvases.

Hermes works first of all with the exit space, as these icons are lost, and he fills them with images of the subconscious, images on the verge of the recognizable. Thus, while entering or exiting, one finds Hermes’ figures breeding in a great variety, as if nestling in the folds of fabric. Hermes unleashes living beings within these ancient icons. Certain images appear within the patterns of the wood, and the artist underlines these already existing images, offering them up to be recognized. This is the creation of a universe on the verge of recognition, in which everything is about to turn into something else. This is not a universe of clearly recognizable objects which we are used to seeing around us; nor is it a universe of infinite patterns or digital objects. These images derive from a hopeless universe of infinite chaos.