Last autumn in the magazine "Afisha" an interview was published with Vladimir Ovcharenko, the owner of the Gallery "Ridzhina", in which he stated: "The problem is that we completely lack a class of the young – we have neither young artists, nor young curators, nor young collectors, nor young gallerists, we’ve nothing".

"It pained me that the informational blindness of one of the people most respected by me in the capital’s gallery business was presented as given fact, as a trend; already then it was clear that the phenomenon of a "class of the young" in Moscow art had occurred, it’s just not sufficiently recognised. And so what do we see - this year can be rightfully called the year of the breakthrough of the youth into our art scene: The Biennale of young artists and curators is running in all venues of the city; fresh new faces are appearing in many regions; as "young gallerists", so be it, it falls to me alone here to be take the rap (although there are at least two others active in St. Petersburg) - but then the new collectors register themselves as a class forever, in that I’m sure. The exhibition, like the current one, is intended to be an annual event - and each time promises to be unique.

It seems to me that young collectors are the last most important link in the chain of the local, intensely developing art market. They mark its stability, it is they who guarantee continuity. They are all involved in art, precise in their judgments about it, truly interested in its goings-on; each has his own view, which to a certain extent is stated in the form of the collection. Moreover these views are by no means banal and, as a rule, almost always do not correspond with the views of the old, major collectors: one is interested in the religious theme, another in the gender one, another in the radical, another in the objectless, and yet another mainly in the youth theme. These are true collections and not simply "a few acquired works", even if there are only three works.

As you know any collection is a work in progress, and here this progress is seen clearly: intuition and emotions go arm in arm with resolute calculation and expectation of growth; the category of the young, as is known, always strives towards the category of the emerging. Collectors of the second half of the first decade of the XXIst century differ from their immediate predecessors just as strikingly as they, in their turn, differ from the collectors of the generation of the sixties. Maybe this is not so obvious - as, however, it is with any young phenomenon. The main thing is that the phenomenon itself exists."

Sergey Popov, gallerist