Vladimir Grig

Thank You for Being With Us Dreams

Vladimir Grig

Thank You for Being With Us Dreams

Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova

Co-organiser: Gridchinhall Gallery

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents a solo exhibition by Vladimir Grig, one of the most prominent contemporary artists, as well as a sculptor and musician. Grig is a nominee for the Kandinsky and Kuryokhin Prizes, the recipient of a Berlin Academy of Arts grant, and a participant in the parallel programme of the 55th Venice Biennale. His works feature in the collections of Russian museums including the State Russian Museum, and in numerous private collections.

Vladimir Grig was born in Krasnodar in 1962. After graduating from Krasnodar Art College he worked for several years as a book illustrator for major publishing houses, which significantly influenced his visual language and instilled in him a love for and attention to textual sources. “At some point I became aware of my ‘literary disposition’ and accepted it as something very organic for me,” explains the artist.

Most of Grig’s works presented in the exhibition are executed in the complex and labour-intensive technique of glass bead mosaic on canvas that he has practised in recent years. Mosaics, which originated in the second half of the 4th millennium BC and were widely used in the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as for the design of Soviet public institutions, became the ideal medium for Grig’s postmodern artistic practice.

Using a variety of media, Vladimir Grig creates fantastical, sometimes hallucinogenic worlds filled with visual alogisms. Akin to medieval murals or book miniatures, his works are hardly subject to the laws of lifelike portrayal. In constant dialogue with his predecessors and contemporaries, from Pieter Bruegel and Ivan Bilibin to Viktor Pivovarov and Takashi Murakami, Grig ironically and freely plays with art history and popular culture. For example, in the ‘Absolute Happiness of the 1960s’ series featured at the exhibition, the traditions of Soviet book illustration, 1950s-1960s print design, and science fiction are combined with the fairy-tale, mystical atmosphere of Bilibin and Vasnetsov’s works, evoking the aesthetics of Russian Art Nouveau.

The characters in Grig’s multiverse transcend the boundaries of space and time, travelling through styles, eras and cultural layers while assuming new and unexpected roles. Here the heroes of Russian folk tales coexist in the same imaginary space with protagonists from classic comics and popular animated films, for example in the ‘Four Seasons’ series.

The impetus for creation of the ‘Detomon’ series came from a historical curiosity. French architect and draughtsman Jean-François Thomas de Thomon worked in Russia, and in the early 19th century he designed the architectural ensemble on the Spit of Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg. To further his career he added the prefix ‘de’ to his name, denoting noble birth. In 2009, during installation of the memorial plaque ‘To the Architecture of St. Petersburg’, which listed the names of great architects who had worked in St. Petersburg, the surname of Jean-François Thomas de Thomon was misspelled. As a result the absurd-sounding and meaningless word ‘Detomon’ was coined. The ironic situation, by which an architect arbitrarily elevated to the nobility received a meaningless nickname, inspired Grig to devise paradoxical artistic compositions. At his behest Thomas de Thomon’s drawings based on ancient themes are invaded by Kolobki [Bread Blobs] from the Japanese video game Pac-Man, by forest spirits from Raisa Kudasheva’s book of the same name, by UFOs and other characters.

The liminal state between imagination and reality, dream and waking life, have become a key theme in Grig’s work. This theme is further explored in the installation ‘Elegy’, created especially for MAMM.

Masterfully reassembling cultural codes from different eras, Vladimir Grig uses a visual language that is relatable to contemporary viewers. In his works the past, present and dreams of the future coexist harmoniously, bringing the joy of unexpected discoveries and a sense of belonging to the universal.

MAMM would like to thank Svetlana and Sergey Gridchin, Maxim Kocherov, Irina Menshikova, Vera Nigmatullina, and other private collectors for loaning exhibits.