Priceless City

The exposition includes artworks by Olga Kroytor, Alexander Svirskiy and Viktor Yuliev — the winners of the contest who get art grants from UniCredit Private Banking. Also it comprises works by Alexey Vasiliev, Alexander Dashevskiy, Ivan Mikhailov, Alexander Brodskiy-jr., Sofia Tatarinova, Sergey Prokofiev, Kirill Makarov, Evgeniya Zorova, Nikolay Alexeev, Natalia Petrova. The picture by Marina Goryacheva — that was chosen by the contest Committee for the new design of the premium card World Elite MasterCard^® — will be exhibited as well.

Every young artist has his own priceless city. For Alexander Svirskiy it is famous architectural monuments such as Melnikov’s house or hidden backyards. For a photographer Viktor Yuliev it is suburbs less populated than the city center and thus reflecting different perception of «proximity». Natalia Petrova have been living for a month in Seoul and collected all checks, tickets, promo flyers and business cards to create a series of collages-memories about this town. Saint Petersburg artist Alexander Dashevskiy depicts the back of the northern capital — austere suburb architecture that from a certain angle of view can be beautiful and poetic.

To participate in competition artists should have supply their works created in painting, graphics, photography or collage techniques. Yet the chief curator of Multimedia Art Museum Ekaterina Inozemtseva decided to expand the range of media presented on the exhibition so that the show would comprise various dimensions of the young contemporary art. Thus for instance besides collage works by Olga Kroytor there will be presented her object made of boards on which a typical building is painted. The object «Barrier» by Sergey Prokofiev was applied as a photograph, but the installation made of fluorescent lamps and imitating a portable barrier familiar to any citizen will be presented in on of the halls.

In the majority of works the priceless city is quite a concrete place, more likely the city where the author was born or is living now. Though the exhibition is not about Moscow or Saint Petersburg, Samara, Voronezh or Ekaterinburg — it is rather about the sense of the city and how a young citizen feels living in it. There are no sweet sentiments but there is tenderness, there is no tragedy of being lonely in the city but there is a melancholy caused by uncomfortable environment. In other words, the full range of emotions that a citizen daily feels and which are as priceless as the city.