"The Grandchildren of October" The children of the revolution loved the "new." In the desire to rebuild the world, new languages of architecture arose, like those of Konstantin Melnikov, Tatlin, and painting, like those of Malevich, Filonov. There were also new names. Viulens and Octobrines, Rheumarks and Rheumiers were registered at birth, enrolled in nurseries, kindergartens, schools and universities, learning the songs of the country of the Great October. Having matured, they joined the ranks of the builders of a new society, turning rivers back, draining swamps and irrigating deserts. Experiments were conducted before, during and after the revolution. The "Newspeak" of the futurist poets, who tried to express the stream of consciousness and rejected outdated forms:
"By throwing a branch, you will give birth to a knock!
She fell on the cranberry mat,
Just like you, with your eyelid closed,
I prayed to the god of another century."
(Velimir Khlebnikov)

"I propose to create monuments to Cubism and futurism in the squares as tools that defeated the old art of repetition and led us to direct creativity," Kazimir Malevich wrote about futurism… The need for a new one with each "new" stage in history is obvious. A new era is knocking on the door and we are parting with the "old" patterns in search of "new" ones. They were already in the blanks with us, like an ace up the sleeve of a cheater… The exhibition "The Grandchildren of October" as a reflection, as an ode, as a pamphlet, as a rejection of their predecessors, the teachers of our teachers!
We are not trying to imitate them or blindly follow the attitudes of the avant-garde of the 20s and 60s, but to discuss with them in a common language for us, the language of art - this is the topic that we focus on in our exhibition. Each of the artists represented at the exhibition, one way or another, in his "artistic gene" carries the desire to rebuild the world in his own way.

The gallery's artists take part in the exhibition: Rust2D, Vladimir Lenin, Nur Ali, Oleg Arnautov, Alla Bedina, Roman Bikbaev, Inga Blomerius, Eva Busevich, Sergey Bryukhanov, Katerina Vishnyakova, Vasily Vlasov, Alexander Vorokhob, Alexander Grushko, Alexey Zhilyaev, Anna Kevrel, Mikhail Pogarsky, Elena Sarni, Kosta Slepukhin, Mikhail Smirnov, Aigerim Syzdykova, Denis Fountains.
photo to the text: author Anna Kevrel

Oleg Arnautov considers the information field of the slogan as a picturesque surface. The previous message, be it a slogan, a sign, or a sign, has ceased to exist in its previous form.
The new message is a pictorial surface, an artistic play between the textual basis, which tells us something through the code of conventional symbols of the alphabet, and the language of art, which explodes the previously dry message with the interaction of different colors, the rhythm of lines, generating connections both pictorial and graphic.

A watchword is a word or phrase that distinguishes friends from strangers. A watchword is a password or a call to action, or some kind of statement.

In the works of Oleg Arnautov, the established form of the slogan, conciseness and readability of the font, is replaced by a picturesque surface with letters dissolved in it. The horizontal elongated surface is all that remains of the previous form.
The letters either completely disappear in the space of the canvas, or create energetically swirling pictorial flows, or dance buffoonishly. It seems that the author is struggling with the text. Almost everywhere painting creates a different mood, a different state than the meaning of the text, thus deforming its meaning.
At the exhibition of the "Watchwords" project, all the works are quite diverse. Works of the fourteenth, seventeenth and twenty-third and twenty-fourth years. In earlier works, the texture is not so strongly expressed, it is not so emphasized. There is still no that beautiful torn texture and pastiness. The project is in development and this also arouses additional interest.
The works of Oleg Arnautov remind me most of all of the works of Jasper Johns, his alphabet or various numbers of the 60s, with the only difference that Arnautov has a craving for a local spot, and Jasper Johns has a desire for decentralization, or, as his researchers write creativity, he experiences the consequences of abstract expressionism. And, if Johnson takes “simple” objects, like Duchamp’s readymades, then Arnautov takes constructions from everyday speech. Treating the sign as a pretext for painting exercises is their common denominator.
Oleg Arnautov’s painting, in its richness and meatiness, gravitates towards the London School, Frank Averbakh, who deprives everything written of objectivity...
Unlike Moscow conceptualists, who grew up from book illustration, from children's illustrated books, the magazines "Murzilka" and "Crocodile", for whom the word is most important, Oleg Arnautov has no desire to narrate, either with text or painting. Its figurativeness, as a thing in itself, is abstract and not associated with any visual image. Only color and graphic vibrations are the artist’s goal.

Yulia Yudovich

If you cannot change the world, change your attitude towards this world.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

This exhibition will help you change your view of the usual passage of time. Every moment is unique and every day should be a holiday. In the world, in addition to well-known holidays, there are a huge number of unofficial cheerful and good holidays. Every day there is a reason for real joy! So let's celebrate the day of the ladybug, the day of the red cat with green eyes, the holiday of apple pie with cinnamon, come up with new constellations, draw a picture on the foggy glass, smile at the first person we meet, treat the birds to oatmeal cookies and admire the color of the flying cherries.
The artist builds his own spicy and intoxicating calendar! For each day, he creates a joyful artistic composition and writes a short poem to go with it. All poems are built into a single annual cycle, where each last line of one verse becomes the first for another, and all together they form a continuous poem of time, consisting of 366 verses. In addition, interspersed with the large circle of poems is a small poetic ring for the twelve months, created according to the same principle. And for those for whom these poems are not enough, three poetry machines have been created that can generate an incredible number of poems. The "Shimmering Cloud of Poetry" mechanism contains more than 5 quintillion options, and the reader, by turning over interchangeable words, can choose his only option. In the kinetic book "Goldbach Hypothesis" operations are carried out with interchangeable lines, and finally, in the latest poetry machine "Notes on the Edge of the Universe" it is possible to build more than 18 quintillion poems from interchangeable stanzas. This exhibition is a real celebration of poetry and art!

Null floated on the water.
We said: this is a circle,
there must be someone
threw a stone into the water.
Here Petka Prokhorov walked - here
is the footprint of his boots
with horseshoes.
He created this circle.
Let us hurry up cardboard and paints,
we will sketch Petka's creation.
And Prokhorov will sound,
like Pushkin.
And many years later
descendants will think:
“Here is Prokhorov once, must be he was
a nice artist."
And they will edify the children:
“Children, throw stones into the water.
The stone gives birth to a circle,
and the circle gives birth to thought.
And the thought caused by the circle,
zero calls from darkness to light.”

Daniil Kharms


The question of dialogue with the viewer and art in time, with what was and what is expected to be - this is a question of the relevance of the statement. The question that worries the authors, each individually and all together, all involved in this process: the creation of visual, in everyday meaning, worthless objects. Record this reflection, a visual monologue, about the dialogue between the natural and the artificially created in some form.
To what extent is it “readable” by the viewer, to what extent this form in the context of art history has the right to be called original. All these doubts accompany the life of an artist.

The authors themselves perceive relevance differently, since Artists belong to different strata, they have a different addressee, viewer. But, of course, they have something in common...a Russian mentality, or more precisely a post-Soviet one.
Their works are ironic, mysterious, contain “mental” constructions, references both to what was created earlier in art and to our figurative perception. They all require decryption.

The main problem of modern art is precisely that the artist develops his own concept, his own “zero” world. He feels comfortable there, but even for other artists, his works may not be readable without commentary...

At the moment when the Artist left the womb of a common myth with prescribed canons of image, with common rules for everyone, the world received, instead of several visually worked out stories and ideologies, thousands of myths and concepts. An incredibly diverse world where there is no single true truth, but there is a carnival of post-truth.

artist and exhibition curator Oleg Arnautov