pop/off/art gallery presents a personal exhibition of Vitaly Pushnitsky "Gap". The new project is a development of the theme of ontological reflections on the perception of the world after death, on a state that is only a gap, a break, a breach between the form and types of consciousness. “All our thoughts about reality are connected with the fact that we have a physical body. It is the starting point. As soon as we lose it, the whole world will become abstract for us. Perhaps it will be fields, spaces, periods...” the artist writes. "Gap" is a part of a large statement, the beginning of a story that consists of theoretical and programmatic reflections for Pushnitsky about the concepts of abstraction and plane, the possibilities of the visual, as well as about the special experience of a person, which cannot be lived in advance, but can be thought.The exhibition will feature paintings, graphics and four original 4K videos. The video animation will be tokenized and will get the status of an NFT object. The chosen format allows the author to expand the issue of the unbodied, immaterial state. Words or mental concepts, also in the video, are intangible, but they are present in the mind as supporting and important constructs: “Animation is like a dispassionate fluidity of thought, I took it as a method,” Pushnitsky notes.

Graphic series "Plants" were being developed with the text of the book, completed by Pushnitsky this year. In the series "Garden" and "Gap" the idea of perception of painting through color, and not through a plot is fully realized and manifested. The work "Germination" touches upon the growth of human thought, its limitlessness and activity. The image of the roots in this work has become a metaphor for thinking: changeable, lively, branchy.In his new works, Pushnitsky changes the pictorial plastic of the recognizable author's language, organically developing his artistic techniques and methods. Focusing on working with a color palette, he creates coloristic gradients, referring to Japanese woodcut, where the plane of the sheet, as in Pushnitsky's works, becomes the space due to color gradation. The artist leaves only this space, abandoning the storyline, the protagonist, leaving only the background, environment, scene without characters. In the works, however, there is an observer, but he is outside, incorporeal, like a certain author's voice-over.

Pushnitsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1967. Pushnitsky got a classical art education (Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg), traveled a lot, studied in the USA and Denmark. In Denmark he gave an author's course of lectures at Design School Kolding. He is currently teaching art practice at the School of Design at the Higher School of Economics. Vitaly Pushnitsky has repeatedly received grants for his works, created public projects for different countries (Russia, India, Denmark, Norway, etc.), took part in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), a parallel program of the European Biennale of Contemporary Art MANIFESTA 10 (2014 Petersburg), the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005, 2007, 2019), the Baltic Biennale (different years), in a number of major international exhibitions. Author of iconic personal projects at the State Russian Museum (2002), the State Hermitage (2006), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012) and the New Museum (2012, 2018, St. Petersburg). Phaidon has included him in the international list of key contemporary authors defining new perspectives in painting. The artist lives and works in St. Petersburg.