Topical Art
2008-2009 Educational Season, spring semester

Recycling
(objects and installations)
18 February - 8 March, 2009

The project is organised in cooperation with the St. Petersburg branch of the State Centre of Contemporary Art.

The halls of the Youth Centre house samples of art created by famous middle-aged artists from St. Petersburg. The people taking part in the exhibition perform aesthetic "recycling", i.e. they create new visuals based on the images inherited from the Soviet era. The organisers have selected the artists whose approach is radically different from the irony of Soc-art or post-modernist substitution of meanings. The generation of people born (and artistically educated) in the USSR have reconsidered their cultural resources, realising that the latter are a natural, if not the only possible, foundation of the new Russian art. The exhibition theme is not nostalgia, but realisation that our historic heritage is unique.

The project is scheduled to open on 18 February at 5 pm.
The workshop for participants of the project will take place on 21 February at 4 pm.

Aron Zinshtein
Life As It Is
(painting, graphic art, sculpture)
8-26 April, 2009

Aron Zinshtein has taken part in many exhibitions in Russia and abroad and is a recognised master of St. Petersburg school of painting. He utilises several techniques, e.g. painting, engraving, dry point, lithography, sculpture, installation.

His large multi-figure genre compositions, landscape paintings, portraits, and still-lifes done in oil on canvas are characterised by an open and light manner of painting and are very expressive. This sketchy manner tells us a lot about the mastery of a talented graphic artist, his subtly sense of colour and knowledge of the laws of painting. Mr. Zinshtein's landscape paintings of the city are highly dynamic and full of complex silvery shades of the true Petersburg colour. As seen by the artist, the ceremonial St. Petersburg is deprived of its imperial austerity and poise, it is full of expression and abrupt dynamic rhythms, but at the same time remains the recognisable glorious northern capital of Russia.

The project is scheduled for presentation on 8 April at 5 pm.
Workshops:
18 April at 4 pm - Painting and Graphic Art: Depictive Possibilities (theoretical class)
19 April at 2 pm - Possibilities of Printmaking: Monotypia (practical training)