Dmitri Gutov
The Deep Blue Colour Of His Skin Shows Just How Self-Absorbed He Is
Paintings and Video
March 10 - April 9, 2005
Thursday-Friday, 12.00-18.00; Saturday 12.00-16.00
Opening: Wednesday March 9, 18.00-20.30
Matthew Bown Gallery is honoured to present the first London exhibition by one
of Moscow's most influential contemporary artists. Since the early 1990s, Dmitri
Gutov has played a pivotal role in the reshaping and reinvigoration of
post-Communist Russian art. He has represented Russia at the Venice Biennale and
in a range of other international surveys including, last year, Moscow-Berlin.
Gutov’s art ranges from exotic large-scale installations (25 tons of earth
dumped in the Ridzhina Gallery, Moscow; 3000 shuttlecocks launched above a
pioneer camp) to minimalistic painting and conceptual events. Recently he formed
the Lifshitz Institute, which took the form of a seminar to discuss the ideas of
Mikhail Lifshitz, a hardline Marxist critic of the Soviet era.
The curator and critic Viktor Miziano has emphasised Gutov’s ambition to
integrate an awareness of history into present-day practice: “Gutov's
historicism has nothing to do with post-modern deconstruction. On the contrary,
it is vital and natural experience of the past as something actual, the work of
thought born by reading the aesthetics and philosophy of Hegel.” (Victor Miziano,
“D. Gutov", in Fresh Cream, Phaidon Press, 2000, p.322).
In Miziano’s view, Lifshitz’s rejection of the "petty intrigues of
self-reflection” has become Gutov's slogan not only in his argument with the
hermetic intellectualism of the Moscow conceptualists, but also in his polemics
against the idea of art’s autonomy. Gutov is obsessed with reality, he insists
on his role as a social artist with an active critical point of view.
Matthew Bown Gallery, in its inaugural exhibition, is showing a selection of
Gutov’s paintings and a video.
Matthew Bown Gallery
First floor
11 Savile Row
London
W1S 3PG
t. +44 20 7734 4790
f. +44 20 7734 4791
mail@matthewbown.com
http://matthewbown.com/