11 November 2022 Art, geopolitics and current events intertwine in the first solo exhibition in Italy of the Russian dissident artist who challenges Vladimir Putin's violence.
Art has always been a megaphone of contemporary contingencies: artists use their mediums to communicate a message and it is not at all uncommon to come across, wandering through the nooks and crannies of art history, individuals who have never been bowed down by the constituted political power, but rather driven to express their dissent with energy and determination.
The tradition of dissidence is still carried on today in a fragile and uncertain geopolitical landscape by the protagonists of the contemporary world scene in which we find the name of Victoria Lomasko.
The artist, recognised abroad as one of the most qualified and talented exponents of Russian graphic social art, finds the opportunity to emerge on the Italian scene through her first Italian solo exhibition, proposed by the Fondazione Brescia Musei and open to the public at the Museo Santa Giulia in Brescia from 11 November. The Last Soviet Artist brings together an important selection of Lomasko's works, also leaving room for site-specific productions capable of showing the artist's qualities of adaptation in new spaces with unprecedented potential.
Presented as part of the Brescia Peace Festival, the exhibition is the third act in the research, curated by Elettra Stamboulis, undertaken by Fondazione Brescia Musei in 2019 with the exhibition by Zehra Doğan We will also have better days. Works from Turkish prisons, and continued in 2021 with Badiucao's solo exhibition China is not near. Works by a dissident artist.
'Victoria Lomasko. The Last Soviet Artist is an exhibition that allows us to enter a hidden geography of the world's largest country, Russia,' says Elettra Stamboulis, the curator. 'Lomasko is an artist who in the Putin period challenged the prevailing aesthetics of contemporary art, placing herself in the midst of the realist tradition, albeit with a very personal and synthetic stroke, while the reaction to the concluded past saw the scene turn exclusively to a rarefied and conceptual art.'
Lomasko's artistic research allows for a meticulous reconstruction of Russia's social and political history from 2011 to the present day: from the anti-Putin demonstrations, which the artist drew live with an original and immediately recognisable stroke, to the depictions of 'deep Russia', that of the forgotten and marginalised, which have always been her favourite subjects.
Victoria Lomasko comments: 'I think a true artist is a sensitive individual who lets the world speak through him. The artist conveys pain, hope and love, but there is one thing the artist must never convey: hatred. In my opinion, art is not there to fight against something (it is not good at that at all), but to offer something. Its main goal, especially while there is a war going on, is to show that humanity is one and indivisible'.
