Pavel Aksenov, Konstantin Reunov, Avdei Ter-Oganyan We Lived in Those Years…

The exhibition We Lived in Those Years... aimed to recreate the image of a Soviet courtyard childhood of the 1970s without using traditional media such as painting, drawing or sculpture.

A composition compiled of numerous volleyball marks was on display at the gallery—as if a bored player had repeatedly thrown the ball against the wall. Yet these round imprints were arranged into a carefully calibrated ensemble, subtly forming the structure of a painting. It was disguised as a fragment of reality, transported into the exhibition space. On the floor, the artists placed a dramatically lit pile of excrement—apparently left by a dog that had been wandering nearby. In this way, the dogmatic realism of Soviet aesthetics was upheld, even though it appeared as a gesture of contemporary art. The format of the exhibition installation was a metaphor for the rejection of traditional artistic media in favor of the action-based practices of the early 1990s. 

ABOUT THE GALLERY ON TRYOKHPRUDNY 

The gallery on Tryokhprudny Lane became a meeting point for the artistic community, which, after many years of stagnating cultural processes and ideological prohibitions, was in need of vibrant and memorable events.

Tryokhprudny brought together people representing a wide range of artistic movements and trends. Seasoned members of the younger generation of conceptualists, who had already achieved international success and whose history was connected to the APTART Gallery, came here. Arrogant, radically-minded Moscow actionists also appeared, as did equally self-assured young art historians—Moscow State University students who were taking their first steps into a somewhat closed professional circle. Elegant partygoers and fans of the neo-avant-garde, whose names history has not preserved, would also drop by. Independent poets, rock musicians, theater people, and even officials from the Ministry of Culture were all keen to attend Tryokhprudny Thursdays. In the meantime, the artists who inhabited the studios—rather exotic figures, representing regional art schools on the Moscow art scene—found their place in the capital’s art world through strategies of interaction and drew more and more personalities into their orbit.

The gallery on Tryokhprudny was a place where an entirely new environment took shape, where important liaisons were born and the most pressing issues in the development of contemporary art were discussed. Friendly conversations and polemical discussions attracted a wide audience that shaped the art scene of 1990s Moscow.