The pop/off/art gallery presents a personal exhibition “Homo soveticus by Arkady Petrov” by the legendary artist of the seventies. The life path of Arkady Petrov is closely connected with his art, which reflects the image of the Soviet man in the street with all his life, hopes and aspirations. The silent characters of his narrative are the workers and functionaries of the system, the bulk, the psychology of which is very succinctly expressed by the artist. The idea of the project is to trace the transformation of ideological symbols and theses in the everyday culture of Soviet and post-Soviet society in the works of Arkady Petrov.

The exhibition will be divided into chapters - four main topics highlighted by the curator. The “Mine” section is a block of works related to the childhood experience of the artist, who was born in the village of Shakhty Komsomolets near Gorlovka, where his parents worked in coal mining. The theme of socialist labor continues with the chapter “Service”, which will collect works related to the concept of duty in its various manifestations. As a contrast, the “Leisure” section will present a block of works illustrating a worker’s free time: a holiday, a smoke break, a long-awaited trip to the Black Sea. And the exhibition will be completed by the theme “Memory”, within which works will be collected that describe romantic and funeral rituals that record important events in the life of a little person. The exhibition will feature more than 40 paintings from different periods of Arkady Petrov, including legendary works of the 1980s, as well as videos and artifacts from the artist’s life. As a dialogue, each section will include works by other gallery authors (A. Andreev, A. Grositsky, Y. Zlotnikov, V. Kupriyanov, O. Lang, R. Lebedev, P. Markova, A. Osmolovsky, V. Potapov, M Roginsky, I. Simonov). Young artists and Petrov’s contemporaries, whose works reveal one of the themes of the exhibition, will be introduced into the fabric of the study of “homo soveticus”.

Arkady Petrov was born in the village of Shakhty Komsomolets, near Gorlovka in the Stalin (since 1961 Donetsk) region of the Ukrainian SSR. Petrov comes from a miner’s family. After spending his childhood in the mining province, he moved to Moscow in 1957. In 1959-63 he was studying at the Moscow Art School "In Memory of 1905", in 1963-1969 – at the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov in the workshop of V.G. Tsyplakov. In the 1970s he was officially working on monumental orders mainly in the mosaic technique in a recognizable primitive style. Easel works were almost forbidden to be shown at the exhibitions. In the 1970s-80s he was close to the group of social art artists: Rostislav Lebedev, Boris Orlov. Leonid Purygin became Petrov's disciple. During perestroika Petrov gained fame also due to the participation in exhibitions connected with the cult film «Assa» as well as to participation in the first Soviet Sotheby's auction (1988) and further auctions. Those years Petrov's works have been purchased into many international collections. Further development in painting is related to a dramatic change in visual language. Petrov still thematizes provincial miner’s life and analytically works with Soviet symbols changing the style of paintings on average once a few years. In the mid-1990s he was also engaged in sculpture and art of objects. In the 2000s and 2010s several museum retrospectives of Petrov’s art took place. He has been actively working on new painting series. Lives in Moscow.