You - I thought - Garden of Eden

on April 15, K35 Gallery of Contemporary Art opened the doors of its new venue, located in the Khamovniki district, with the exhibition "You-I Thought-Paradise Garden", featuring paintings and graphic works by famous St. Petersburg artists: Oleg Maslov, Ilya Gaponov, Natalia Spechinskaya, as well as objects made of glass by a young author, Sergey Kolosov. The main theme of the exhibition is the return to the sources as an opportunity to comprehend new experiences.

The poetic title of the exhibition, borrowed from a poem by Vladimir V. Mayakovsky, "You - I thought - Garden of Eden. Mayakovsky's poem "You - I thought - Garden of Eden" becomes the basis for the idea of the entire project, which invites the viewer to reflect on large-scale shifts in the world, on the point of no return to the "past" life and on the exit to a new unknown reality.

Turning to biblical texts, the curators draw parallels to the present day, asking, "Who and when tasted the same fruit from the tree of knowledge and now threw it to rot?" The comparison of reality to Old Testament history, while obvious, proves to be an accurate, vivid, and simultaneously hopeful move. After all, even after the most acute upheavals the world tends to revive and transform. Life with its joys and sorrows, beauty and unsightliness each time invariably turns out to be stronger than any seemingly irreparable civilizational catastrophe.

The exhibition brings together more than 20 paintings, drawings and sculptures, created especially for the exhibition by four artists from St. Petersburg. Among them are glass objects by Sergey Kolosov, revealing the theme of elemental foundations of the universe. Rich and cheerful canvases by Oleg Maslov, a well-known hedonist painter. In their contrast are brutal landscapes, painted with bitumen by Ilya Gaponov, a master of the industrial genre. As well as works by Natalia Spechinskaya, combining classical motifs with surrealistic images.