General illustration for Kashira Highway, From the series Gold Lines

Andrei Monastyrsky is one of the main ideologues of Moscow Conceptualism, a leading contemporary artist, and a co‑founder of the group Collective Actions, which began producing spatial and time‑based actions in 1976. Over the years group members have included Nikita Alexeev, George Kiesewalter, Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, and Sabine Hänsgen. Most of the actions were documented and published in fifteen volumes entitled Trips Out of Town.

In 1996 Monastyrsky began creating the series Golden Lines. In the decades that followed he continued systematically working on this series as a particular contemplative and meditative experience. The artist identifies faults such as spots and marks that have appeared during the process of developing photographs‑be they shots of the Russian provinces, a snowy landscape, a self‑portrait or an absurdist still life‑covers them with metal rivets and joins them in a line. The artist proposes that the abstract structures which result can be interpreted in three ways: as maps of the metro, as a system of constellations or as medieval Taoist symbols from the Book of Changes.

General Illustration for Kashira Highway references Monastyrsky’s eponymous psychedelic realist novel based on his diaries of the early 1980s. The text was part of the fourth volume of Trips Out of Town (1986). Full of theological terminology and hallucinatory images, the work explores the experience of coming into contact with the transcendental against the background of Moscow during the period of stagnation. The main character approaches faith with the self‑indulgence of a neophyte, as a result of which he ends up in a psychiatric hospital on Kashira Highway. Monastyrsky’s character is increasingly unwell but sees this as getting closer to spiritual perfection. In the Orthodox tradition there is a developed allegorical description of humankind’s struggles with passion and temptation on the path toward virtue. In General Illustration Monastyrsky uses one of the most striking images from this iconography, the thirteenth‑century icon The Ladder of Divine Ascent from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. The mirror image of the ladder, by which monks ascend to heaven beset by demons, combines with the golden pattern of the “Taoist diagram of ‘internal alchemy’.” The strange construction hanging in the air is set against the background of a group of people who are retreating into a forest, referencing the work of Collective Actions.