Personal Mythologies

The exhibition Personal Mythologies presents the work of contemporary artists of the younger and middle generation, who combine the use of a distinctive imaginative language and work with a purely painterly or sculptural medium, whose craft and haptic qualities give spatial facticity to magical and personal phenomena. The central motif of these works is often the human figure, the human being as both subject and object, set in a fantastical story full of unexpected and irrational events and influences. Figuration and narrative refer to various historical styles, from antiquity to Romanticism, Surrealism, Magical realism and Naive art. Its practice follows postmodern strategies of appropriation and symbolic actualization of historical experience with a pervasive emotionality that is far removed from intellectualized and conceptual artistic expression.

References to historical reminiscences do not imply an escape from the present; on the contrary, they represent a way of relating to a complicated present. The selected works show the heightened need to break down and revise myths in the context of changing narratives of gender, and the general status of man in an era of acknowledged debacle of civilizational values. The face and body language signal often inarticulate content in response to the untrustworthiness of the messages presented and their multiplicity, revealing a gap in understanding the current state of affairs. Rationality fails or appears untrustworthy and inadequate. In its place are irrational imaginations, magical stories and metaphysical figures that make it possible to cope subliminally and intuitively with the external world.

photo: Polina Davydenko