“Kirill Blagolepov, 32 years old, Moscow” is a first personal exhibition of Vladimir Potapov at pop/off/art gallery. In this project Vladimir Potapov becomes a researcher of Media appealing tosocial network’s impact and its manipulation with our consciousness.

The main protagonist is Kirill Blagolepov whose Facebook profile (probably fake) was created forlikes and followers cheating. This profile consists of other users’ reposts and pictures that serve as a material for Potapov’s paintings. The serie applies the artist’s technique known for the use of colorfulholographic film. The paintings commemorate this virtual character who becomes a real person with his characteristics and qualities. Creating a personal mythology of his character Potapov asked a professional psychoanalyst Roman Istomin to describe Kirill’s personality and give his psychologicalportrait. Out of verbal description and a flow of pictures surrounding him, artist is creating an image of millions of Kirill Blagolepovs flooded the social media.This project is both a monument of anonymity and a hymn to digital avatars pretending to be a real person. “We all have witnessed an emergence of a new essence – a digital one. For a brief moment of its short life it manages to imitate a human consciousness, influence social political processes and turn into a digital dust which leaves nothing behind. I will commemorate this replica, find and describe itsidentity and make Kirill Blagolepov a household name“, Potapov says.

Vladimir Potapov (1980) is one of the leading Russian artists of the middle generation, curator, theorist, and popular of contemporary art. He is well-known for the conceptual approach to painting medium, which resulted in a sequence of series, problematizing the surface, space and material of a contemporary picturesque artwork. He gained a degree in The Volgograd State Institute of Arts named after P.A.Serebryakov. Later on, he graduated from the School of Contemporary Art Free Workshops, Moscow. Potapov was nominated for a number of major regional and international awards in contemporary art. He has participated as an artist and curator in dozens of group exhibitions. Recently Potapov had a personal exhibition in Kunsthalle Rostock (Only History Lies Ahead, Rostock, Germany, 2018), and in The Moscow Museum of Modern Art (From Memory, Moscow, Russia, 2015).