Andrey Grositsky

Identified object

ANDREI GROSITSKY

Identified Object

Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova

Co-Organisers: Prometheus Foundation  

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents ‘Identified Object’, an exhibition by classic Soviet and Russian artist Andrei Grositsky. The artist’s works are held in major Russian collections, as well as in domestic and international private collections.

Andrei Grositsky was born in Moscow in 1937. In 1959 he graduated from the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute and began teaching at the Correspondence People’s University of Arts. His colleagues included iconic Soviet artists Mikhail Roginsky, Boris Turetsky and Ivan Chuikov. It was during this time, among like-minded individuals, that Grositsky’s unique style developed, inextricably linked with an interest in simple objects, their texture, and the paradoxical ‘life’ of inanimate matter. 

Grositsky’s attention is drawn to mundane things: a lamp, a machine tool part, a tube of paint, a trough, hammer, meat grinder, key, or scrap of fabric... This genuine interest and sensitivity to everyday objects was shared by other Soviet nonconformist artists, but Grositsky’s painting style and compositional approach is truly unique. The artist removes everyday objects from their usual context and places them on a monochrome background; in this way he not only creates ‘formal portraits of things’, but also estranges them. At times his formal portraits assume a fantastical aspect: a crude component of some mechanism breaks away from its pedestal and begins to levitate against a tremulous, unsettling, blue background. The harsh industrial quality of Grositsky’s objects radiates a melancholic fantasy, just as in the film ‘Stalker’ rusty metal from the Zone harbours otherworldly life. We perceive estranged everyday articles as alien aggregates – only by looking closely can we again recognise them as everyday objects. 

The life of objects is a central theme for Grositsky. He performs this ritual vivification through his pictorial style. The artist meticulously reproduces the smallest chips, defects, and textural imperfections on surfaces – in Grositsky’s works the things acquire an excessive physiological quality. He shows the life of objects paradoxically, by demonstrating the vulnerability and painfulness of this matter: whatever can suffer is alive. Grositsky awakens our empathy for objects: rust is correlated with decomposition, pipes crookedly connected by a nut with an improperly fused elbow joint, a broken key with a dislocated arm, the dark red piece of metal against a light background with a jagged wound.

Grositsky’s world of objects is self-sufficient. According to the artist, he is interested in “the existence of objects independent of human existence”. At the same time, the objects he paints seem like bodies. Scale also contributes to this impression: the artist magnifies items that are small in reality, making them easier to relate to humans. We are stunned by the realisation of the value of life at the moment of catastrophe, when it feels especially fragile. 

Grositsky’s compositions are baroque, characterised by the indomitable movement of mass energy outwards, from the depths of the work. Objects outside themselves – this state of Grositsky’s world of objects is consistent with the formula of the baroque. Some of the artist’s works can be described as trompe-l'oeil. The baroque genre involved creating the illusion of a three-dimensional object through painting. Grositsky’s impasto paintings sometimes match the texture of rust in practice and are read as relief; the depicted objects become cramped within the frame of the rectangular canvas, literally transcending its boundaries. All this allows us to classify the artist’s works not as ‘paintings’, but as ‘painting/objects’.

In addition to Andrei Grositsky’s paintings, MAMM presents his graphic works, some of which have never been exhibited before. In his graphics the artist’s compositions acquire lightness. If the massive painted objects can be identified with the bodies of the suffering, then the subtle graphic sketches are their souls. They still writhe and pulsate, but all these states are transferred to a different, subtler register of perception. 

Graphics become a laboratory for the artist. It is in his graphic works that he assembles strange mechanisms from the fragments of everyday life, which you could call organisms – the artist, like an alchemist, strives to create a new form of life. 

The act of vivification is not simple: life asserts itself in sometimes strange, painful, and tragic forms – such is the artist’s paradoxical optimism. Grositsky is confident in the creative power of art: “The very nature of creativity refutes hopelessness... the very act of creation affirms an optimistic principle.”

For the loan of works for the exhibition, MAMM would like to thank:

Prometheus Foundation and personally Ivan Tyryshkin,

Anton and Natalia Grositsky,

Sergey Alexandrov, Vyacheslav Ershov, Mark Kurtser, and Denis Khimilyayne