Exhibition curator: Polina Borisova
“Perpetual Motion” is the first exhibition in Russia to survey kinetic art on this scale, from its origins to the present.
Kinetic art emerged as a coherent movement in the West during the 1950s. Critics began to use terms derived from the Greek kinesis, meaning movement, while a new figure appeared: the artist-engineer, using mobiles and mechanical or optical devices to make movement itself the subject of art. Many of the movement’s foundations, however, can be traced to the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
Naum Gabo’s “Standing Wave”, made in Moscow in 1920, is often described as the first fully kinetic artwork. It treated movement and dynamic rhythm as aesthetic materials.
Kinetic art crosses the boundaries of art, design, architecture and music. It works with stillness and movement, light and darkness, optics, sound and silence. Building on the Russian avant-garde and many other fields, it produces new forms of artistic synthesis while reflecting technological progress and the ways people respond to it.
The history is told through works from the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Vladimir Mayakovsky State Museum, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, ROSIZO, the Prometheus Research Institute in Kazan and several private and personal archives.
Vladivostok audiences can see landmarks of Russian kinetic art including Vladimir Tatlin’s model for the Monument to the Third International, Leon Theremin’s instrument, Lev Nusberg and Sergei Zorin’s Cyber Flower, Vyacheslav Koleichuk’s tensegrity structures and line stereograms, Boris Stuchebryukov’s razor-blade sculpture Galatea, Leonid Borisov’s mobiles, German Vinogradov’s BiKaPo and light-music objects from Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau. Reconstructions of works by Gustav Klutsis, Naum Gabo and Alexander Rodchenko appear alongside lithographs by El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich and newly commissioned work by contemporary kinetic artists.
Participants:
Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, Karl Johanson, Kazimir Malevich, Ilya Chashnik, Tavel Shapiro, El Lissitsky, Tatyana Makarova, Dziga Vertov, Grigory Gidoni, Georgy Krutikov, Konstantin Melnikov, Leon Theremin, Solomon Nikritin, Arseny Avraamov, Boris Yankovsky, Group “Movement”, Lev Nusberg, Francisco Infante, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Sergey Zorin, Alexander Grigoriev, Galina Bitt, Rimma Zanevskaya, Victor Stepanov, Anatoly Krivchikov, Mikhail Dorokhov, Vladimir Akulinin, Prometheus Student Engineering Bureau, Bulat Galeev, Yuri Pravdyuk, Leonid Borisov, Boris Stuchebryukov, Mikhail Karasik, German Vinogradov, Roman Sakin, Pasha 183, Dmitry vtol Morozov, Ilya Trushevsky.
