a group exhibition feat. feat. Marina Alexeeva, Maria Arendt, Ludmila Belova, Vita Buivid, Alexandr Dashevsky, Laura Dekker, Lee Edwards, Andrey Gorbunov, Amir-Nasr Kamgooyan, Boris Kazakov, Alexandra Mazur-Knyazeva, Ivan Plusch, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Alexandr Shishkin-Hokhusai, Ivan Tuzov
Artist, curator, dealer, provocateur and polymath Marcel Duchamp is a Pandora of art history for some and John the Baptist of modern and contemporary art for others. Among many disruptions of the order and normality of what was set to be called ‘art’, in 1935 he created Boîte-en-valise, or box in a suitcase, a portable miniature monograph including sixty-nine reproductions of the artist’s own work. In the following years, he created other editions of the boxes, with varying content and luxurious touch, including a special edition for long time friend Peggy Guggenheim. Is it a portfolio of artist’s work or an individual piece of work, or maybe both? As enigmatic as ever, Duchamp was not meaning to provide a definite answer.
An inaugural exhibition at Shtager Gallery in London unites under the same roof in a compact space not only one, but multiple group and solo ‘exhibitions’. The conceptual gesture of Duchamp is peculiar in the contemporary context of commercialisation, gentrification and scarcity. How many narratives and stories can strategically fit in a small experimental space?
Duchamp anticipated and contributed to the institutionalisation of many forms of presentation within and beyond artistic fields with his radical and daring innovations. Curriculum Vitae and a personal statement are the standard of self-presentation now. The radical nature of his heritage is timeless and in the currents of crises in contemporaneity, becomes actual and even urgent.
Attention deficit alongside the culture of acceleration lead to us to necessity to be more effective in literally all aspects of modern life. The functions of the museum, gallery, artist-run and independent project spaces are merging with each other in search of new meaning as the social and political conditions of artistic production are evolving towards new, seemingly tougher, but possible just different frontiers. Revisiting in this context the most influential ideas of the age of manifestos is more than necessary.
A portable exhibition is presented here in the form of an intellectual vortex: it drags the viewer into its own laws of matter, gravity and light. Just like it is in the space of contemporary media, where the increasing number of simultaneous voices create more autonomous images of subjective real.
By placing the artists in an experimental, multiversal and hardly comprehensible conversation, a strategic cacophony, there is an emergence of the question about what we observe in the constantly accelerating societies: is too much the new not enough?
'too much as not enough’, curated by Denis Maksimov, is the first exhibition in an upcoming yearly cycle of research in contemporary miniature art practices in Shtager Gallery (Studio 24, 87 Crampton Street, London, SE17 3AZ ). Vol. 1 will run from May 18 till May 30 with the opening on May 18, 19.00, by the lecture by Denis Maksimov on Duchamp, acceleration, radical forms of presentation, experimentation & ‘too much as not enough’ series (RSVP: shtagergallery@gmail.com).
Shtager Gallery moved from the cultural capital of Russia, St Petersburg, to one of the global art capitals, London, the UK, in 2017. Founder of the gallery Marina Shtager has been working in professional art world since 2006 in the roles of director and curator. She founded Shtager Gallery in 2014. Elephant & Castle is an experimental art space conceived by Shtager Gallery in cooperation with Morris & Associates in 2017.