4 July 2022 The thread linking Brescia to artists and writers disliked by the regimes continues. After Zehra Dogan and Badiucao, Russian dissident artist Victoria Lomasko arrives in Brescia.
For the first time in Italy, the exhibition Victoria Lomasko. The Last Soviet Artist, curated by Elettra Stamboulis, will be on display at the Santa Giulia Museum from Friday 11 November 2022 to Sunday 8 January 2023. It is organised by the Municipality of Brescia, the Brescia Musei Foundation and the Festival of Peace. Confirmed, therefore, was what had been announced in March by the director Stefano Karadjov, who at the time, however, had remained very tight-lipped about the name.
The artist Victoria Lomasko in the Loggia.
The exhibition will give ample space to the works of the artist, who will spend a period in the city to create new ones dedicated to what she has been living and observing in recent months. Lomasko's artistic research focuses on the social and political history of Russia from 2011 to today: from the anti-Putin demonstrations that the artist has drawn live with an original and immediately recognisable stroke, to the representations of "deep Russia", that of the forgotten and marginalised, which have always been her favourite subjects. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Skira.
The Artist Profile
Lomasko was born in Serpukhov, 99 km south of Moscow, in 1978. Her father, a metalworker, acted as an artist provocateur in secret, and perhaps this family tradition prompted her to always work with a non-conformist outlook. Having graduated from Moscow State University in Graphic Arts in 2003, Lomasko immediately embarked on an uncomfortable path that combines observation and action, documentary drawing and performance, activism and personal commitment understood as the artist's body that does not shy away from being part of a group. This aspect transversally characterises the artistic biography of Lomasko, who has been living in Europe since March 2022, having tried until the last to remain in her own country so as not to interrupt her role as a witness. The artist is in fact part of a global movement that uses drawing as an instrument of resistance and chronicling.
International Reputation
Considered by critics and the Anglo-Saxon press as the most important Russian graphic social artist, Lomasko is essentially still unknown to the Italian public, although her books have long since been translated into English, German, French and Spanish. The Other Russia won the Pushkin House Book Prize in 2018, although the book has never been published in Russia. A documentary, The Last Soviet Artist, directed by musician and composer Geraint Rhys, was made about her.
Her works have been exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, which acquired part of the archive, in Basel, London and is currently a guest at Documenta in Kassel.
