The history of an art gallery is not merely comprised of a chronicle of its employees and artists. Each gallery creates a unique flowing sequence of art events, the fragments of which settle in collections. Artworks, exhibitions, fairs, public discussions – all of this forms the vortex of artistic life. Within this continuum, it is the unique role of any gallery to maintain this "Gust".

It is namely galleries that unite the isolated participants of the Art world, helping them move in a lively tempo, thanks to the inspiration of the art directors. Any noteworthy gallery creates an invisible circle in which artworks, artists, collectors and society become connected. However, even against this backdrop does the history of the pop/off/art gallery stand out.

Sergey and Olga Popov, having come to the commercial sphere of Art from the museum environment, set themselves an ambitious goal – the creation of a special kind of gallery. They centred its activities around the principles of academic Art, while introducing new artistic trends. In the gallery's circle of artists, they began to include Soviet nonconformists and conceptualists, as well as actionists of the 1990s, the younger generation of the 2000s and of the 2010s, consequently offering a vivid cross-section of the last 50 years of Russian Art.

The history of the pop/off/art gallery is presented at the exhibition through works by artists who have been collaborating with it for 20 years. The sections of the exhibition reflect four types of aesthetic experience that have been important for the gallery's artists and art directors in different periods. These artworks, carefully preserved by collectors, have captured the elusive feelings that the gallery helped its artists to express. Evading easy description, they, nevertheless, can be grasped in these artworks united by key mythopoetics.

Although it is impossible to cover the entire list of projects organised by the gallery over this 20-year period, the exhibition offers a subjective overview of those years. Needless to say, an objective historical and artistic analysis is still to come. Meanwhile, we invite you to look at the history of the pop/off/art gallery that continues to exist in impressive works of art, thanks to the efforts of the artists, collectors and art directors.

Curated by Ivan Novikov