Rough cuts

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the pop/off/art gallery present Rostislav Lebedev’s exhibition “Rough cuts” - a new large-scale project by the classic of unofficial art.

In the project “Rough cuts”, Rostislav Lebedev remains true to his critical and ironic method of deconstructing artistic reality. Working with well-known images - images of world art or popular culture, avant-garde classics or Soviet symbols - Lebedev combines them in his works, discovering new meanings and forms of popular images.

The title of the exhibition “Rough cuts” refers to the artistic method of Rostislav Lebedev. Unlike many authors who use a barely noticeable, hidden “montage” of ready-made images, Lebedev prefers the sharp dissonance of images, a sharp transition from one sign to another. It is precisely such “rough cuts” that, according to the artist, are capable of carving new, fresh meanings from the simple fact of the meeting of two well-known images.

The exhibition of the project included more than 100 works - both already known works from museum and private collections, and new ones created specifically for the exhibition at MMOMA. The works will be presented in 9 halls, each of which addresses a specific artistic medium of Rostislav Lebedev. Among them, for example, adding a picture, text, volume or expressive gesture.

Rostislav Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1946. He graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical University from the faculty of Fine Arts and Graphics in 1969. At the turn of the 1970s he joined a group of artists, later known as the “Ulitsa Rogova group” – according to the location of the studio of one of them, Boris Orlov (the group also included Dmitry A. Prigov, Igor Shelkovsky and others). In the atmosphere their studios and several apartment shows in the begining of the 1970s, they developed the “meta-art” method which formed the basis of the “Sots Art”. Except for Lebedev and Orlov a number of Moscow artists joined the same movement, including A. Kosolapov and L. Sokov, as well as D. Prigov and V. Bakhchanyan. The term itself belongs to the duet of artists V. Komar and A. Melamid, who applied it to their exhibition in 1972.

Over the course of several decades, Lebedev’s aesthetics has repeatedly changed. Nevertheless, he remained true to his critical and ironic method, often translated into an archive or a research work. Lebedev's works could be found in significant museum collections, as well as in private collections and foundations around the world. Lebedev is based in Moscow.