Auction 2 New Now Russian Contemporary Art

Many times I have heard the question addressed to artists: "Why do you do contemporary art?" They return a question "What else could I do?" in nine out of ten cases

These are important words to listen to. When the sacred image of the creator is a thing of the past and artistic practices are being undertaken by people with different backgrounds, education and skills, we realise that art is definitely not about craft, craftsmanship and continuance of traditions. But then what is it about?

Being also an Artist, I've certainly pondered what contemporary art is. For myself, I define it as a measuring instrument. Measuring - not producing, that's important. It can change its functionality in different contexts: somewhere it will measure temperature, somewhere it will measure radiation, somewhere it will measure sound volume. However, unlike a physical device, art reads any reading - even those inaccessible to scientific knowledge.

Answering the question "What else can I do?", the artist finds himself in a position where art becomes the only possible way to measure the world. In a situation where our lives have changed beyond recognition in just one year and the whole world is in crisis, art remains the only phenomenon that reacts immediately.

As strange as it may sound, today our auction will be about a fairy tale. In 1928 V. Propp, a Soviet philologist, wrote a fundamental work entitled 'The Morphology of the Fairy Tale". We learned that all the characters in a fairy tale are classified into roles, and each performs strictly defined functions. Someone sends the main character on a journey like the Tsar. Someone helps him get to the netherworld like Baba Yaga. And someone gives a magic object - a magic carpet or an apple. However wonderful the characters may look, each of them meets the hero for a reason: it is only after traversing the whole path - from his homeland through the "Russian Nowhere", to the edge of the world and back, that the hero becomes Tsarevich and acquires happiness.

So, today each of the artists we have selected for this auction is a character, each object of art is a magical object, and you are the main character in a magical fairy tale who has a great adventure through modernity and its world behind the looking-glass.

Safe journey!

Maria Kryuchkova

Auction Curator