Press Release

We Can Do It
Group Exhibition
January – May 20th, 2005

The beginning of every project already contains the entire range of its future meanings. It carries a genetic program, determining the subsequent evolution of its organism, fulfilling and developing its principles at each stage.

This project is absolutely unexpected while at the same time it possesses that much needed relevance, the necessity for which has long been felt not only by the Moscow art market but art processes in general, infusing them with new life. This is above all a major event, one that incorporates some international strategies and latest visual technologies. Moreover, this exhibition has been announced as a part of the gallery’s program timed for the First International Moscow Biennial. The event is being launched by a commercial cultural institution, which has already earned a well-deserved reputation in New York’s Chelsea district, known for its radical art practices, as well as among Berlin’s independent art galleries during the years of Germany’s changing status. Now the art gallery’s international dimension, which has long been represented by the Moscow Museum Center, will be replenished by this organization in the Russian tradition, the first meeting place of the Russian avant-garde, a living reality absorbing post-modern thinking.

The gallery’s Russian location right in the center of the capital, in close proximity to the Kremlin, in the area of the Russian Enlightenment -the courtyard of the old Greco-Latin Academy- provides a space for a cultural dialogue and its adaptation through private and corporate collections, thereby creating opportunities for a widening of aesthetic borderlines of art and its natural trans-cultural existence.

The project is firmly rooted in the foundation of the classical avant-garde, assimilating art history into the system of lofty art traditions while its area is still being “mapped”, creating echoes and reflections within the present art scene. It is precisely this transitional situation that provides opportunities for developing new means of communication in art, for discovering independent media-cultural collections, for creating a specifically Russian artistic context that puts an end to its local existence and places it into an international context of visual arts.

While planning this project the gallery avoided any narrow and outdated stylistic tasks. The integrity of this approach consists primarily in the diversity of its modern artistic vision, ranging from the conceptual geometry of the universal communications of Peter Halley to the integral paraphrases of Archimboldo in the energetic baroque images of Vik Muniz, and from the paradoxical clones of Tony Matelli to the idealized human constructions of Antony Gormley. The project’s vectors are movable and multi-dimensional, creating a highly modern artistic landscape with varieties of brilliant summits and spacious valleys, marked by Tony Oursler’s multimedia sculptures/installations, the majestic cosmogonic paintings by Torben Giehler and the unbridled freedom of Kristin Calabrese’s artistic gesture.

For all its radical nature, derived from the culture of intensive intellectual forms, this project preserves some inner ecology within itself, which reaches its summit in the image of a “natural man” that we find in the compositions of Stephan Balkenhol. His wholesome simplicity carries traditions of the great archaism where the Biblical Adam meets the cosmic Purusha.

In actual fact, this project represents a model of the modern artistic consciousness with its non-linearity, asymmetry and complementariness, that creates an essentially new harmony that is in tune with today’s civilization. Gary Tatintsian, a curator and connoisseur of artistic innovation, has now turned his attention to a different representation of the world at this time of changing paradigms and visual codes, opening up many other layers in the visual reality.

The collection presented here clearly displays the contours and elusive meanings of contemporary culture. This is a testimony to the active dynamics of the current art processes into which Russian art is being irresistibly drawn while the young and boisterous Russian art market is ready to create for it a worthy modern image.

Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc.
Iljinka Street 3/8 bld. 5
Moscow, Russia 109012
Tel: (+7 095) 101-21-02 Fax: (+7 095) 101-21-04

e-mail: info@tatintsian.com