Museum

Curator: Almira Ousmanova

Artist: Ruslan  Vashkevich

The «Museum» by Ruslan Vashkevich aims at challenging the concept of museum as a «bastion of ‘cultural respectability’» (P. Virilio), whose walls firmly protect the world of art from the interventions of the street and from profane judgments on the Beautiful and Sublime.

 

Ruslan’s "Museum" allows us to live through a synesthetic experience of art in all its completeness, and to reveal its multimedia character, due to the expansion of our perceptive capacities and play of imagination.

 

Although this exhibition has not been thought as a retrospection, it gives a certain idea of a range of artist’s creative apparatus. Vashkevich constantly experiments with different genres and techniques, developing his own artistic language. In this personal «museum» paintings can be found side by side with installations, suprematic reminiscences are followed by a tribute to Velasquez, and photography makes a common meaningful circle with sketches and reproductions, while anamorphic transformations allow an easy transfer from thriller to erotics, and a classical still-life is perceived as a prototype of contemporary advertisement.

 

But "Museum" was also an exhibition-insight, a narration on the adventures of a wandering gaze, which belongs to the artist who was able to evaluate professionally works of earlier authors, and who tried to make sense of the evolution of visual image – from hand-made artistic devices of visualization to computer-generated effects.