Join the artists, curators and some special guests for the opening of our first online exhibition, on International Human Spaceflight Day
Pushkin House is proud to announce our first online exhibition, COSMOS: Reverse Perspective, by Liz Davis, Fred Scott, Gleb Sobolev and Marina Sokolova, curated by Pierre d’Avoine and Gleb Sobolev. The exhibition is supported by the Nikolai Fedorov Library (Moscow), the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky House-Museum (Kaluga), and the Museum of the First Flight (Gagarin).
Opening on 12th April – the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into outer space (and International Day of Human Spaceflight) – the exhibition of collages and graphics focuses on looking back at Earth from space, rediscovering our own earthly lives, experiences and challenges. Taking the “reverse perspective”, the artists offer the cosmos as an alternative lens for life, one opposed to a single perspective or absolute reference frame – a distributed vision, geometrically expressed as a Russian icon.
"Our vastness serves as a transition to the vastness of the heavenly space, this new field for a great feat," wrote Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the father of Russian cosmism, a philosophical exploration of space that took place before the technology to reach it had even been developed. The predictions about space and life in zero gravity of his contemporary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) grew out of the history of the development of the Russian steppes, with its snows and frosts, endless spaces that have shaped the culture of the peoples living on it.
Join us for the opening event on 12th April to learn about the works in the exhibition, as well as an introduction to Russian cosmism from Anastasia Gachaeva, filmed at the site of Gagarin’s monument in Moscow.
Liz Davis is an artist working at Cubitt Studios in London. She is a painter, but also works in 3D, film and collage. Liz says:
Muscovites believe that at nightfall the statue of Yuri Gagarin shakes off his heavy gauntlets and sets off on nocturnal wanderings above the City and beyond. As dawn approaches Garagin must hurry back to his pedestal on top of a column on Leninsky Prospekt, within sight of the Golden Brain [the Russian Academy of Sciences building] for us to fantasise as to where he has been during the hours of darkness. My work is the result of a visit to Moscow in the winter of 2017. The scale of everything, infrastructure, public monuments and architecture is gigantic.
Fred Scott is an architect and artist. He has been visiting professor of interior architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, has taught at the Architectural Association in London, and was Principal Lecturer and Course Leader for Interior Design at Kingston University. Fred writes:
With the realisation that by combining separate images, one could make montages that could indicate aspirations as well as showing the actuality of the architecture. On my only visit to Moscow I was astounded by Red Square. It is the most impressive urban space I have experienced including its famous buildings, the walls of the Kremlin and the buildings within protruding over the wall. The mausoleum, the slope, the markings showing the choreography of tanks and ICBMs on their carriages.
Gleb Sobolev is a practicing architect and member of the Moscow Union of Architects. He teaches at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI) and taught at the Moscow Architectural School (MARCH). He graduated from MArchI and studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Gleb has for more than four years curated his own international educational projects "Ruralities" and "Architecture and Context". He writes that,
In our present comfortable state, we have forgotten about the Earth, its rhythms, cycles, difficulties and dangers, its beauty and fragility have become marketing tools and computer screensavers. We are like children who have made a mess of the house and want to escape from it to Mars or the moon of Jupiter to avoid the consequences of their own irresponsibility. Looking at the Earth from space is looking in reverse perspective from the surface of the sphere to a point, onto each of us. In this perspective, the scale and proportions of objects change, the close-up is insignificant, and the distant appears with increasing detailing.
Marina Sokolova is an architect, artist, member of the Moscow Union of architects, tutor at the Moscow Architectural School (MARCH), and author of numerous articles and publications, and educational programmes in art and architecture. As an artist, she works in graphics, collage, easel painting, various mixed techniques, sculpture. Marina has been a participant in over thirty exhibitions. She says:
The duality of the intimate and distant is also present in the picturesque fragment of the barn of the Russian wooden house. Through the exposed roof structures, the piercing blue of the sky shines through, exciting in its remoteness and inaccessibility. Once upon a time, the origins of Russian cosmonautics emerged in such houses. The wooden roof appears to us partially ruined — just as the domestic wooden architecture gradually collapses, weakening the ties of man and place. The further away we are from home, the more free we feel in outer space, the weaker these ties are the more our home, our planet needs our attention and protection.
