Only a really lazy person has not discussed the notorious fame of Oleg Kulik during the recent two or three decades. Transparent invisible objects, brutal Expo Art of the 1990s at the Regina Gallery, his beastly scowl, flying sculptures, social design and the ambitions of a Tibetan guru, operas staged at the Châtelet, and the I Believe! show… No other contemporary artist seemed to wander so desperately far and wide. But that is not quite right.
No matter what Kulik was doing, he never went (or trotted) far from his only task, the discovery of the boundaries of contemporary art, no matter how rapidly the notion of these boundaries was mutating.
It turns out that it is not enough to freeze the moment if you want to catch meanings in their endless mutual mimicry in the infinite stream of events, trivial, blasphemous or sacred, it is necessary to frame it. The frame is the oldest and the most reliable way to comprehend the image presented to the viewer. Yet, in visual art, the image often proves to be too familiar, a symbol, almost, exhausted with the frequency of use. What happens to the frame and our comprehension in this case?
Frames, an exhibition at the Regina Gallery, is an attempt to trace profound mutations of the frame at various levels: at a trivial one (no viewer, or the crowd as a whole will be outside the framing procedures), at the “blasphemous” (it will deal with highly publicized political scandals of the recent period), and the “sacred” (esthetical experience in its interaction with the religious and the mystical).
