Today, September 18, the Cultural Foundation "Ekaterina" (Kuznetsk Bridge, 215) opens the exhibition "Face. Image. Time. Image Rights in Art: From Modernism to the present "within the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The idea of the project belongs to the founders of the Fund Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin. The exposition will include 115 works from the collection of the Fund, most of them are demonstrated for the first time.

Image rights since ancient times has been one of the major themes of world art. It is the image of man, for centuries occupied the minds of artists and recreated in different styles and variations, from cave drawings to the classical "nude" or modern self-portrait, is a litmus test, demonstrating not only the descriptive language or artistic credo of the artist, but the trend stileobrazuyuschie era.

In the first section of the exhibition will display works by Russian artists of the late XIX - early XX century, anticipating and triggering the transformation that occurred in Russian art in the 1910's.

The second half of the XIX century marks the flourishing of academic and salon art. Images rights in a variety of genres, including rare for Russian art genre "nu", becomes the dominant artistic challenge.

The situation changed with the emergence of a group of artists, the Wanderers, proclaimed in peak academicism new art program centered on a critical demonstration of social phenomena and realistic pictorial language.

Artworks Henry Semiradsky , Ilya Repin , artists of" Jack of Diamonds "and cubists-futurists demonstrate change and the disappearance of traditional genres and a new era in art where the foreground figure of the avant-garde artist, creates his artistic universe. Image rights, whether portrait, figure or group becomes a laboratory for experimentation with artistic form.

For the contemporary artist and a person becomes a kind of material with which he clearly demonstrates his artistic strategy, entering into dialogue with the philosophical and general cultural context of his time and the art of previous epochs.

In this regard, of particular interest is the largest section of the exhibition devoted to contemporary art. In the work of artists 1960-80-ies was formulated an alternative concept of art which prepared a fertile ground for artists of the 1990's - 2000's.

image of the man was one of the main themes in the works of Russian artists of several generations. Metaphysical reflection of the sixties and the attempts of identity in the Soviet system of coordinates are replaced by irony artists Sots Art and the "nonsense" conceptualists, which opened doors to artists of the "new wave" and such parties the contemporary art scene, as Oleg Kulik , A . Vinogradov and V. Dubossarskii , V. Mamyshev-Monroe , S. Shekhovtsov , R. Mamedov, and many others.

The Art of the late XX - early XXI century affects the abundance of individual artistic concepts, finding new forms of art and visual means, successive, like a kaleidoscope. The main source of interpretation of the image of the person often becomes a mass culture and mass media, has today become a global flow of information, erasing borders between countries and continents.

What changes undergoing interpretation of the image of man on the path from modernism to contemporary art? How is a man the artist previous era and our contemporaries? What they see themselves and their time? These issues raise a new exhibition project, presenting works by outstanding Russian artists of the late XIX - the beginning of the XXI century and contemporary Western artists.

The exhibition features works from the collection of the Cultural Foundation "Ekaterina", including the work of G. Semiradsky, Ilya Repin, Brodsky , P. Konchalovsky , I. Mashkova , V. Alimpieva, Albert Yu , E. Berg, R. Mamedov, S. Balkenhol, Bulatov , I. Kabakov , B. Orlov , V. Pivovarova , S. Faibisovich , V. Komar and Alexander Melamid , Volkova ., E. Gorokhovsky , P. Pepperstein , G. Guryanova, Dubosarsky and Vinogradov, O. Dow , I. Davis, Zakharova , pp Shekhovtsova, V. Kozhukhar, V. Koshlyakov , O. Kulik, K. Rehimov , A. Salakhova , O. Tobreluts , G. Chahal , of «Blue Noses» , Pierre et Gilles, T. Matelli.

By the opening of the exhibition published an illustrated catalog.

The exhibition runs until December 13, 2009.

Photo from the exhibition can be viewed at forum ARTinvestment.RU .

Source : Press release Cultural Foundation "Ekaterina»