In his artistic work Petrov has always been inspired by images arising from his own happy destitute post-war childhood, by typical examples of Soviet mass production, serene kitsch: painted postcards, cheap statuettes and, of course, aniline mats with painted swans, mermaids and other beauties from folk fantasy. Love messages and alluring fairytale delights were intricately interwoven, in the city space, with communist slogans and with promises of a bright future, as unreal as fairytale worlds. In his new series of paintings Arkady Petrov combined, radically and, at the same time, with the naturalness characteristic to him, these two myths, authorized the interaction of two depersonalized utopian constructions, whose roots run through the whole of the Soviet XXth century.

In the exhibition the 2008 – 2009 canvases are next to genuine aniline mats of the 1950s from the author’s collection. There is no Post-Modernist artificiality here. The following of fashion for “that which is Soviet” and the bravado, typical of Sots-Art, have not been the stimulus for Petrov’s painting for a long time and, in fact, never were. The feeling of the country and of the epoch was instinctively inherent to him and guided him in Art over the course of a few decades, along a path which did not conform to the mainstream: neither the underground, nor the official. But it is precisely that path which today is considered the brightest page of making poetic everything which was positive in Soviet kitsch and mass culture of the previous century, moreover, not lacking irony.

Arkady Petrov was born in 1940 in Gorlovka, Donetsk (formerly the Stalin) Region. Having spent his childhood years in a coal mining province, in 1957 he moved to Moscow. After graduating from the Art College “In Memory of the Year 1905”, he studied in the Moscow State Art Institute n. a. V. I. Surikov between 1963 and 1969. In the 1970s his original style was revealed in monumental commissions, whilst his easel paintings rarely passed the official exhibition selection committees. By the mid-1980s Petrov was considered one of the key artists of the generation, in spite of the fact that his only solo exhibition in the Soviet period was almost not allowed by the authorities. Fame came to the artist on the break of the 1980s – 1990s: he created large paintings, participated in major international exhibitions, his works have been bought by foreign museums and collections. Petrov’s works are in many museums and significant private collections throughout the world.