City as an Artist's Subjectivity


City as an Artist's Subjectivity is a publication in the format of an artist's book, spearheaded in St. Petersburg by the artist-curator Alexey Parygin. Thirty-five modern artists from four Russian cities took part in the project.

History of creation

Every invited artist created only one graphic composition accompanied by the author's commentary, a short text with their understanding of a large modern city. All graphic sheets are collected in specially designed publishing boxes. The limited edition of the portfolio included 58 numbered copies, signed by the authors of the compositions, the curator and the publisher.
All graphic sheets are made in color, in various printed graphic techniques: lithography, linocut, woodcut, plywood engraving, serigraphy, stencil, etching, manual typesetting, manual photo printing and others.
So each sheet of this edition is different from one another: tinting with a brush and spray paint, colored pencils, watercolor or acrylic. All graphic sheets are created on paper of different type and tone, specially selected for each author, which was the project's program setting.
The curator invited artists with an established creative style to participate in this publication. All of them belong to different generations and schools and have different, sometimes diametrically opposed views on the tasks and value criteria of art.
Thirty-five project artists: Vladimir Kachalsky, Valery Mishin, Alexandr Borkov, Valery Korchagin, Viktor Remishevsky, Alexey Parygin, Viktor Lukin, Marina Spivak, Mikhail Pogarsky, Igor Ivanov, Grigory Katsnelson, Leonid Tishkov, Andrey Korolchuk, Gafur Mendagaliev, Kira Matissen, Petr Perevezentsev, Ella Tsyplyakova, Yan Antonyshev, Mikhail Molochnikov, Dmitry Kawarga, Igor Baskin, Boris Zabirokhin, Evgeny Strelkov, Anatoly Vasilev, Vasiliy Vlasov, Alexandr Pozin, Vyacheslav Shilov, Nadezhda Anfalova, Ekaterina Posetselskaya, Andrey Chezhin, Igor Ganzenko, Yuri Shtapakov, Alexandr Artamonov, Anastasiya Zykina and Vasya Khorst.

Key ideas

The project logo is a black circle that outlines the sheet; it appears on the title page of the publication, on the cover of the catalog and on posters for exhibitions. It is a minimalistic sign of hermetic completeness and, at the same time, an image of a wheel, of movement.
Urban routine, observed on almost every corner. From the banal to the sacred and back again.
The city within. Triviality, vaguely recognisable uncertainty, an endless variety of interpretations is the City. Subjective, personally experienced understanding of the modern metropolis.

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