Pavel Pepperstein believes that the life of the art world often takes the form of collective meals, modest or luxurious banquets, lunches or dinners. It is in such situations that artists, museum employees, gallery owners, art critics, historians and art researchers discuss pressing issues.
Text by Pavel Pepperstein.
Needless to say that the subject of a feast, a banquet, a meal is one of the central themes for European painting? Well, and not only European, of course. I have always dreamed of joining the glittering galaxy of magnificent painters of the past, who proudly called themselves "painters of feasts" and "singers of feasts." This exhibition is a modest and even somewhat shy attempt to advance in this enchanting direction.
As is well known, the life of the art world often takes the form of collective meals, modest or luxurious banquets, lunches or dinners. It is in such situations that artists, museum staff, gallery owners, art critics, historians and art researchers discuss the burning issues that together form the “soil” from which art then grows. Such dinners mark the opening of exhibitions, and dinners accompany other notable events in the field of contemporary art with heart-warming frequency. As a rule, these meals take place in restaurants located near certain art spaces (museums, galleries, etc.). But sometimes dinners take place in the art spaces themselves.
A series of paintings presented at this exhibition depict a series of dinners supposedly taking place in major museums of contemporary art. The dinners are depicted in a frankly mythological manner, and an attentive viewer may discover that they are attended not only by people, but also by animals, birds, aliens and other strange creatures whose origins are unknown. Ultimately, it seems that at these dinners there are some mysterious "everyone" or even "everyone-everyone-everyone", as Winnie the Pooh said. And I would like to finish with the words of Dostoevsky, describing the oratorio of Stepan Trofimovich: "And even one mineral sang something".
