Anna and Vitaliy Cherepanov are young artists from Yekaterinburg, who are already well-known among contemporary Russian art, present "Park Volniy" — a project they have been working on for about four years — at OVCHARENKO. Park Volniy is a specially built environment filled with works of art of the widest range: painting, video art, sculpture, ready-made. The theme that unites all these works is the art and the artists per se, their creative path, achievements and doubts, intuition and forecasts for the future.
The authors explain the main idea behind the project as follows: "Park Volniy is a reflection on how to reconcile different interests, develop interactive strategies, allow oneself to use the will in the public space, and learn to accept and hear someone else's".
The idea of a harmoniously arranged living space — a garden of earthly joys — permeates the culture of modernism ("there will be a garden city"). Postmodernity did not destroy this adamant striving for a harmonious structure of the world, only slightly eroded the means of achieving it, moving them from the sphere of production to the sphere of service. According to this logic, the work of people of art can also be viewed as a service, and this is the way — ironically and a bit detachedly — the artists build their "Park Volniy ".
They seem to offer to look at the ideas of life-building from the outside: this is a field of art, of course, but a playing field, reminiscent of the game of golf; here, victory can be achieved by hitting the right slots (as in, getting into the galleries, museums, and collections). Therefore, one of the parts of the project is a witty story about "success" in the field of art — the series "Coach Painting".
In another part of the exhibition, the artists offer the viewer a video filmed on video surveillance cameras, where the events of everyday life are interspersed with episodes played out in front of the cameras on purpose, thereby questioning the concepts of real and documented.
The most moving and utopian of the projects within the series is the "Cherepanovs’ Sets" — boxes with specially selected objects: children's toys, travel souvenirs, objects found on the street, which, according to the authors, can playfully convey the thoughts and emotions of the artists themselves to the viewer.
The artist's self-identification in a rapidly changing, harsh and selfish world (apparently, it has always been like that) is a very important and noble theme. In addition, artists become our guides into the realm of the intangible and the high, even if it is a service sector nowadays. It is noteworthy that artists from the provinces are most responsible for this task: in Yekaterinburg, the "Ode to Liberty" is born, a kind of manifesto of dignity and independence in art. And our gallery is happy to present this amazing space — Volniy Park — to the Moscow audience.
About the artists:
Anna and Vitaliy Cherepanov are one of the most striking phenomena in the Russian artistic process. They work both together and as separate authors under different pseudonyms. In their practice, artists turn to various media: performance, video art, installation, street art, painting. Having started their creative career in Nizhny Tagil, they participated in the art group of the ZhKP (2012-2017), organized an independent gallery "Kubiva" (2014-2017); in 2016, they began to produce the zine "Sharmirdobro" and the "Dice" action (2017 to the present). In 2018, the Cherepanovs moved to Yekaterinburg, where they live and work to this day.