The pop/off/art gallery opens the new 2024-2025 exhibition season with the "Ochre" project by the artistic duo Vika Begalska and Alexander Vilkin, some of the leading authors of the contemporary Russian art scene. The exhibition features tempera painting on canvas from the last three years - from 2022 to 2024.

Continuing the line of previous projects, Begalska and Vilkin once again turn to individual mythology and create a poetic world with various images and heroes characteristic of their works: monkeys, hyenas, dogs, skeletons. The duo's paintings combine pictorial and graphic techniques, where the canvas acts not just as a basis for creating space, but as a field of action, an active element of the image. The viewer sees multi-component works and the author's design - already recognizable artists’ techniques in working with painting.

Although the works feature many shades of ochre (from sand to umber), the project's title refers not only to the color. Ochre is a natural pigment consisting of iron oxide hydrate with an admixture of clay, which was used to paint caves during the Paleolithic period. But ochre also has disinfectant, repellent and sacred properties: it was used in healing and burial rituals in different cultures.

"Ochre is what is underfoot," the artists say, also referring to the material, tangible side of the pigment, which turns out to be dirt on a shoe and paint on brushes. "As the earth requires passage, so the space of the painting calls for exploration, revealing itself not just as a place for escape, but as a territory for creating a new community, a difference of meanings," the authors continue. Through the exhibition solution, Begalska and Vilkin introduce the viewer into the space of painting, which turns out to be not only an act of escapism, but also a speculative practice, a field of imagination that creates and unites.