Satire on the past and the present. Exhibition "The Beginning" by Anna and Alexandra Shchegoleva

The opening of the exhibition "The Beginning" is the official birthday of the creative group "1/2", an association of two artists with an independent, original vision of the world.
The idea for the group emerged when artists approached the age limit of 30 and 60 - that is, the very mathematical ratio of "one second" that allows you to "play with words": there is the "digitization of society" and the interaction of "two halves of one whole"..

The first joint exhibition of Anna and Alexandra Shchegoleva launches a long-term project, which, according to the artists, will be presented throughout the country - from the Northwest region to the Far East.

Both artists have serious exhibition experience in Russia and abroad. The extensive "service record" of Anna Shchegoleva - an original artist working in the style of "synthetic realism" - is striking in its vast geography: since 1999, Anna has repeatedly exhibited her "achingly Russian" paintings in China, Japan, Australia, Korea, France, Britain, Germany ... And if the great Vasily Vereshchagin brought images of faraway and outlandish worlds from his travels in Russia, Anna Shchegoleva, on the contrary, for 20 years has shown the world our wonderful motherland. Today's, not abstract, "cheapskate" - the way she first saw and realized the post-Soviet, perestroika state, then the Russia of the "zero years", and now the Russia of the 21st century..

There are three hypostases in Anna Shchegoleva's work: artist-researcher, artist-psychologist and artist-philosopher. The first one discovers the phenomenon, the second one analyzes it and gives it a "verdict". The third one makes sense of the new-found experience and creates on its basis an amazingly deep, moral and warm image - a real "ark of Russian characters".
Alexandra Shchegoleva is the next generation, flesh from the flesh of the "90s": a bridge between the great Soviet culture and the culture of the future - not yet finally understood and found by the creators of the "new time".

If the "fathers" lived in the creative canons defined by time and the system, whether they were "left-wing" or "right-wing" tendencies, the "children" are exempt from all norms and frameworks.

"Everything is secondary..." "To be or not to be..."
Alexandra Shchegoleva responds to these "Hamletian appeals" with an appeal to the thousand-year experience of world art. Its intellectual branches... This author's idea is that "time and place of action are only scenery, hiding the essence of phenomena that have changed little since the days of ancient Rome. Poetic, often dramatic images - whether a cross-section of another culture, the subconscious, a dream - are as if looking for a companion in the viewer, making him ask moral questions, wonder, and sometimes recall that not only Socrates could say, "I know that I know nothing..."

Two philosophies collided in the 1/2 association: anna Shchegoleva, a person from the Soviet Union, a romantic with humanistic values, and Alexandra Shchegoleva, a melancholic chronicler of human passions, striving to "stun" the national identity in order to discover the "original" - the basis that separates Man from Monkey, Good from Evil, Life from Death, the eternal from the momentary.. The alliance of two authors of such different worldviews, representatives of different generations is a real "fusion of epochs", undoubtedly, interesting to the viewer!