28 march – 18 may
The All-Russian Decorative Art Museum is opening an exhibition of artist and collector Kirill Danelia.
The title “Five” refers both to the five-year ‘anniversary’ of Kirill's and Museum’s cooperation and to the sacredness of the number “5” itself. In the Greco-Roman tradition “5” is the number of sacred marriage, as it is the sum of female (even) twos and male (odd) threes.
The exhibition will feature more than 30 works: assemblages and paintings created by the artist between 1990 and 2024. The viewer will also see several significant works from the artist's own collection of the art of ancient China - these are original terracotta figures that are 1500-2000 years old: figures of a dog of the Han Dynasty of the I-II centuries, horses and court ladies of the Tang Dynasty of the VII-IX centuries.
This display of author's own works and objects from his collection in a single space is attempting to present the two facets of Danelia’s personality - the inner world of an artist and a passionate collector.
Kirill Danelia, Honorary Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, was born in 1968 in Moscow. He studied at the V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Art Theater Studio School. For 15 years he lived and worked in New York, USA, and in 2003 returned to his homeland. The author's works are represented in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Central Theater Museum named after A. A. Bakhrushin and other cultural institutions.
Main characters are: the violin - an object that Kirill has been addressing for many years, considering it perfect; construction fences, all the time interfering with walking for the inhabitant of the megalopolis; a saxophone that wanders somewhere between the crossroads of Manhattan and Soviet cuisine. All of them find their place in the assemblages and canvases of Kyrill Danelia.
An assemblage is a compositionally calibrated work with trash. But in this case we are not talking about abstract garbage blaming man for his unceremonious presence on the planet, but about the poetics of individual things, abandoned, unnecessary, but firmly pinned to each other, like old friends. Paste strokes of alkyd enamel (the kind used to paint fences) and cheap Crimean wine glue the fragments of the assemblage together even stronger than shared memories bind lovers. Museum-like, dusty, gray-brown coloring is unobtrusive and will never get boring, as the songs learned in youth under the guitar never get boring.
If we talk about the genre of Kirill Danelia's works, they are probably not still lives, but genre scenes. Akin to the jazz standard in music, assemblage retains the right to be an actual technique, always a bit vintage and, as a result, sentimental. Sentimentality, the capacity for feeling, emotional intelligence is an essential art of its owner: sometimes you need to be able to wear a fedora or listen to vinyl. Drinking glass bottles, old boards and violins shattered by life are silent in unison about humanism, about the fact that life is a beautiful waste: such truths, as simple as “12345”.
Author of the text Ulyana Dobrova, art historian.
