Artists from the Ural set up an art ATM near the Kremlin, which changes material to spiritual

An ATM which, in exchange for a banknote of any denomination, issues a "piece of eternity the color of soot ...".

The preview of the 5th Industrial Biennale presented art hailing from the Urals. In the fall in Yekaterinburg, artists from all over the world will talk about immortality - an art show that turns 10 this year promises to be a landmark event in culture. In the meantime, in Moscow, opposite the Kremlin, the Red Line Gallery shows "working" art. When you find yourself on Red Square, it becomes obvious that industrial art from the Urals is not a local phenomenon, but a whole movement.

A hit of the exhibition-announcement of the “Immortal Season” of the Ural Biennale was an art object that received the nickname “Bankomart”, which changes material to spiritual.

At first glance, the machine is like an automatic machine - inconspicuous, gray. The instruction is elementary: you insert any bill - you get an author's drawing, carefully glued to A4 sheet. For guests of the vernissage, this is a game of suspense. A peculiar lottery: you never know which “ticket” you will get. It is important that the person himself determines the price of art, this is an operation outside the laws of the art market. And the fact that the invention makes it possible to buy a painting is as simple as a cup of coffee in a machine - the border between art and life is rapidly melting. For authors, Bankomart is also a means of income. They made three of these: installed in the Yeltsin Yeltsin Center, Samara Gallery Victoria and Nizhny Tagil Gallery Narodnaya. The authors of the art object upload graphic works of various artists to the ATMs.

In general, artists survive in the Urals as they can. With fiction. In total, the Moscow exhibition has more than ten authors who make the weather on the art map of the Ural region and far beyond. At one time they all took part in the “factory” biennale in different years. The curators of the Moscow exhibition Svetlana Usoltseva and Marina Fedorovskaya chose artists for whom the Ural Biennale gave impetus to development, and showed what they did after the art show.

Among such artists is Vladimir Seleznev, winner of the recent Innovation Prize in Contemporary Art. At the exhibition, his work “Suprematism from Euroshop”, made for a project in German Kiel, is a series of abstract paintings on cheap kitchen oilcloths.

- Do you know what the buzz is? - says Alisa Prudnikova. - He did these works six months before the scandal with the collection of fake Malevichs happened (at the beginning of 2018, the world art community questioned the authenticity of the collection of Igor Toporovsky exhibited in the Belgian museum. - M.M.). I then told him: "Vova - you are intuitive, made a prediction!"

Seleznev himself believes that his inadvertent forecast is a confirmation of the status of avant-garde art: “it doesn’t matter what the approximate suprematist composition is applied to, on an oilcloth or a spinning wheel, as in Ghent, the object is immediately recognized as art and ends up in the museum.”

In the Urals, even humor with a hint of severity. Take, for example, the work of Lyudmila Kalinichenko “An artist, a curator, his friends and fantastic critters.” Fantastic creatures are not diving wickedness and sniffing for you, but our relatives - geese, hens, sheep and rabbits. In the painting of the Yekaterinburg artist, the animals gathered at the table with the bright representatives of the Ural art community and froze in poses from the Leonard’s Last Supper. At first glance, the ironic allusion to old art and modern Hollywood cinema turns out to be a call for humanity in general and in the art environment in particular. “Every minute we can become full or eaten,” - says Lyudmila.