The pop/off/art gallery presents a personal exhibition “Berlin Diary” by Andrei Krasulin (born 1934), a Soviet and Russian sculptor and artist of the sixties generation. The project is dedicated to the author’s 90th birthday and will embody Krasulin’s visual diary about his move from Moscow to Berlin in the spring of 2022 and the organization of a new way of life. The exhibition will feature about 20 works by the master created in 2023-2024.

Despite the fact that Andrei Krasulin began his artistic career with sculpture, turning to painting only in the 1990s, and he is best known for his spatial works, only paintings will be presented at the exhibition. An important component of the project is the basis of the works: they are all made on paper, embodying the fragility and subtlety of life in a new place, as opposed to the strength of the canvas and familiar life in Moscow.

Thematically, the works of the Berlin Diary exhibition can be divided into three groups. The exhibition will open with works related to samples of paints and surface primers. They will symbolize the painter tuning his tools to begin not only a new work, but also a new period of his life. So, creating his world anew, Krasulin also equips his workshop. To recreate the familiar image of a Moscow studio, in which there were many spatial works, he introduces into the Berlin workshop the first sculptural composition or ready-made - a shelf, the image of which will appear in one of the works of the project as a pictorial record of the artist’s everyday life.

The already tested palette will be used in the next part of the exhibition’s works, visually united by the use of text in them: from a list of tasks for the day and purchases in a store to unpublished poems by the artist’s wife and fragmentary phrases. Some of these texts will be surrounded by “colored frames”, as if outlining the day and separating everyday life from each other. In another group of paintings there will also be images of hands - they often appear in the artist’s everyday drawings, since they are the most reliable models for working from life.

Finally, the exhibition will be closed by works from the series “Circles, Spirals” - a topic that Andrei Krasulin also repeatedly addresses in his diary sketches of the last two years. According to him, the day becomes not empty if you draw at least a circle or a spiral. At the same time, these figures act as symbols of regularity and cyclicality - the artist’s art, our everyday life and the history of the country.

Andrey Krasulin was born in 1934 in Moscow. From 1953 to 1960 he studied monumental and decorative sculpture at the Moscow Higher Art and Industrial School (now the S.G. Stroganov Moscow State Art and Industry Academy). In the Soviet and post-Soviet years, Krasulin worked a lot in collaboration with architects close to his views, including on government orders: mainly bas-reliefs in theater lobbies and public sculpture, often memorial, with abstract forms that were not typical for that time. Krasulin began to take an active part in exhibitions after the collapse of the Soviet Union - the artist’s exhibitions were repeatedly held in the largest museum institutions in Russia and Europe.