How was the evening of vernissages

It’s always clear when the Vernissage evenings are at the Vinzavod. The path from the metro to the Center, joined by you, will still lead through crowds of people united by one thing—being among the first to see new exhibitions. Along the way to the Center, we met Alexey Korsy, the mentor for this season’s «Open Studios, ” and right at the entrance of the Center was the artist Irina Korina. But we won’t linger; we’ll run along with everyone else into the galleries.

Let’s start with the pop/off gallery! Here is the exhibition by Vladimir Potapov, «What Will Not Come True, We Will Dream About It"—his fourth project at Sergei Popov’s gallery. Potapov continues to create melting paintings, transforming the image into something fluid and almost elusive. In this sense, the exhibition perfectly captures the mood of the vernissage: in a single evening, one constantly shifts between different artistic worlds without having enough time to fully settle into any one of them. Here, we sit a bit on a bench, listen to a tour led by the artist Vladimir Potapov himself, and then we move on.

Catching the first autumn rain, we rush to the Nizhny Novgorod gallery BUDUSHCHEY/FUTURO. We stop for the opening of Pavel Grishin’s work and meet the entire team from the «Svods» Center, where the artist presented a massive ceramic chimera. Grishin references the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, but historical reconstruction is clearly not the main focus here. The December events serve more as a jumping-off point to discuss the romantic hero, rebellion, and local history. Historical figures and settings shift; familiar events take on unexpected forms, and the romantic nobleman transforms from a concrete figure of the past into an almost literary archetype. The result is a story not so much about the Decembrists as it is about how, two centuries later, we continue to invent our own versions of the past.

After FUTURO, we went to the XL Gallery. There, gallerist Elena Selina opened Igor Samolev’s exhibition, «When Branches Turn into Sticks.» A branch can turn into a stick, the living into the dead, the natural into the technical, and an object that never was a weapon or a tool suddenly acquires that function. Samolev examines the state of transition—not the final result, but the second when the change is merely occurring. Attending this new exhibition by the artist of the year, according to the Cosmoscow fair, were everyone from Sofia Trotsenko, founder of the Винзавод CSCI, to artist Kirill Preobrazhensky.

Through the mist of the September rain, we sprint to the final point of the route—the Art and Design School gallery. Liza Savina, the curator of the exhibition «We Choose—We Are Chosen, ” invited seven collectors to select the best works by students of the Art and Design School. What makes this interesting is the fact that there is no single criterion for selecting the works. Naturally, everyone—from the collectors of Ekaterina Romanova and Pierre Brosche to the artists of the Art and Design School—showed up. Near the end, Olga Sviblova, founder of MAMM, and art critic Yulia Tikhomirova slipped in almost unnoticed.