Ruarts Gallery of contemporary art, with the support of Italian Institute of Culture in Moscow and MASERATI, will present two personal exhibitions of Italian artist Riccardo Murelli and Moscow photographer Mikhail Rozanov in a joint project Costruzione/Constructions. The show will include photographs, installations, etchings and sculptures. The name of the project precisely reflects artistic points of different and independent artists, whose artworks declare independence from reality and its consecutive submission. Both artists work with abstraction, creating their own creative dimension.
The aim of Constructions show is not to present a bunch of separate artworks, but to try to discover common mechanisms in artists’ work and to distinguish where this commonness becomes a border for integration. Murelli and Rozanov work with different media, but at the same time they construct art worlds, which are expressionless and based on simple geometric forms. Both of them were highly influenced by avant-garde and minimalism. Their works are plotless and emotionless, fixed on essential elements and on a triumph of geometric forms in different combinations. The main difference of the artists is in the plastic thinking: Riccardo Murelli has installation thinking and Mikhail Rozanov photographically thinking.
Mikhail Rozanov is standing in a position of dreamer, destructive for reality – poetic manner of his works is always aspiring to ideal. The main focus is shifted to a pure form, but it doesn’t interest the author in its pristine, in its complete implementation – the most important thing is that what he can extract by transforming it. In a series of black and white photographs, presented at this exhibition, Mikhail Rozanov creates new structures and surfaces that become a new reality through geometric compositions, volume of light and shades. Taking photographs of buildings, he destroys their form, breaks them to pieces, bending them to his creative will and aesthetics.
Riccardo Murelli is fixed on a form and it is significant to itself. He creates site specific installations, light-boxes and etchings, practically excluding the observer from the discussions about the meaning and significance of his artworks, but at the same time he gives absolute freedom and involvement. Creating his artworks, Riccardo is guided by almost scientific laws, using lines interrelation. His art product, as in minimalism art, is identified with structure. Reproducing principle goes to the second place, thereby the form itself becomes extremely and the only active.
Mikhail Rozanov was born in Moscow. 1990-1995 he studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University, faculty of history. Since 2010 he works as a lecturer at British Higher School of Art and Design at faculty of photography.
Mikhail is a well-known Moscow photographer, working since 90s, the author, who continues the traditions of the St. Petersburg New Academy. By critics he is informally called "Rodchenko of neoclassic". Mikhail Rozanov only works with black and white photography, avoiding colors. RuArts Gallery will present one of the latest series Geometry, dedicated to urban architecture.
Riccardo Murelli was born in Rome. He is one of the active participants in the contemporary art process in Italy.
At the university he studied anthropology, philosophy, history of arts. Murelli began his creative career with painting. Then, working as an assistant to the famous American sculptor Beverly Pepper, Murelli turned to abstract sculpture which became basis of his work. Since then his works developed in different styles and techniques, such as: sculpture, calcography, where each of his works has been changed becoming the part of special installation projects. Works based on geometrical forms became allegoric interpretation about pace of human life gradually focusing on the concept of transparency, on connection between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces, macro and microscales.
Murelli’s works are not only esthetic objects filling the environment, but also the embodiment of philosophical conception of introspection – self-contemplation, metaphor of the human experience. Paying great attention to the emotional effect of his works, the artist explores the problem of interaction and confrontation of the scales – macro and micro, and the nature of spaces – private and public.
Among his first teachers the sculptor-philosopher names Italian sculptor, creator of futurism – Umberto Boccioni and Russian constructivists, masters of avant-garde – Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, who allowed us to understand the importance of interaction of art with the environment.
