Whirlwind art

The Lyuda Express features local artists in three-day blitz exhibitions.

By Luisa Schulz

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 8, 2012 (Issue # 1721)

FOR SPT The Lyuda Express closes Aug. 15.

A small, compact container is currently playing host to a two-week-long art gallery on New Holland island at which the exhibition changes every three days.

The Lyuda Express, also known as the Laboratory of Great Creation, opened in the city on Aug. 1 and will host local artists through Aug. 15.

The idea of such a dynamic gallery is the project of curator Pyotr Bely, who carried out a similar project two years ago in a small gallery space on Mokhovaya Ulitsa provided by his friend Lyuda. There he held weekly exhibitions over a period of nine months.

He has now returned with another, accelerated edition of this exhibition reflecting the mutability of contemporary art and dissolving the fixating, static nature of a gallery into a type of flip-book. “The quickened rhythm of our work in a way destroys the distance between the spectator and the artist,” Bely explains in the exhibition leaflet.

The small-scale format of the exhibition requires some sort of artistic minimalism, which serves as the link between the otherwise very different artists. They also share common ground as they are all from St. Petersburg.

In the days since its opening, the gallery has already featured artists Alexander Morosov with his cosmograms made out of neon tubes and the Mylo (“Soap”) Group, whose visual formalizations of political jargon as well as installations were on display.

From Aug. 8 through Aug. 10, the venue will feature work by young artist Kirill Khrustalev, who uses witty subscriptions to give a new meaning to items often viewed as trash such as beer cans and cigarettes. This will be his third exhibition and will also feature some previously unseen work.

The next whirlwind feature (Aug. 11) will be devoted to pieces by Konstantin Simun, an art world veteran best known for his Broken Ring memorial on the Road of Life, the frozen winter transport route and only access to the besieged city of Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, at Lake Ladoga. This exhibition, however, will present items from his recent series, Apocalypse, and includes photographs of plastic canisters that appear to have washed up on the sand with mask-like human faces carved into them.

The exhibition finale belongs to Vlad Kulkov, an artist known for creating nests of strings resembling pieces of coral and coiled up snakes, and opens Aug. 14. The series to be seen at the Lyuda Express gallery, however, is marked by more austere, thorn-like forms reminiscent of 20th century Rayonism.

Lyuda Express will hold exhibitions through Aug. 15 and is open from noon until 8 p.m. on New Holland island. For more information, visit www.newhollandsp.ru.