An installation the size of a nine-story building has grown in Moscow City

A meditative exhibition for lovers of space and everyday joys has opened in a popular gallery

A meditative exhibition opened in the Stella Art Foundation gallery on the first floor of the Mercury Tower in Moscow City. It’s called “About all the things that live there.” There – it is in the cosmic emptiness that many so often feel around. The deserted space of the works of three artists – Nina Kotel, Alexandra Mitlyanskaya and Evgenia Solomatina is filled with small everyday joys like elephant figures, crumpled sheets or village fields.

In the semi-darkness of the spacious hall, the audience is greeted by a giant 25-meter “scroll” by Nina Kotel, who, using colored pencils, depicted a cosmic void with “fantastic creatures” on a single sheet of paper. All these are little things dear to her heart: a colored bouncing ball, a toy car, a paper clip, a seashell.

Most often, miniature figurines of elephants are found here. It would seem that the elephant is huge, associated with power and scale, but here it seems like a needle in a haystack. But it is precisely such small, dear objects that create the right mood. Nina, who has been traveling around India for many years and collecting figurines of such elephants on vacation, says that you can save yourself only by focusing on pleasant little things.

It is no coincidence that as an epigraph to this project, its curator Alexei Korsi chose a quote from a poem by Heinrich Heine, dedicated to the poet’s teacher, the great philosopher of German idealism, Hegel: “I don’t like the fragmentation of the Universe, I’ll have to go to the learned German. He has a short reckoning with existence; Having brought everything to a reasonable combination, he will mend the holes in the universe with an old dressing gown and other rags.”

In this way, Heine good-naturedly ridicules Hegel’s grandiose ambition. Sometimes it’s worth forgetting about the scale and focusing on the microcosm. This is exactly what Nina Kotel does in her monumental pencil drawing. Her neighbors Alexandra Mitlyanskaya and Evgenia Solomatina follow the same principle.

The youngest of the participants, 45-year-old Evgenia Solomatina, presents the photographic series “This too shall pass.” The pictures resemble still frames from a home video. At the same time, the moments are captured very accurately and with mood: a fragment of a portrait of her daughter, where we see only a piece of the shoulder and developing hair; the curve of a curtain from behind which light streams. In a word, it seems like a familiar fragment of interior from everyday life, but there is so much warmth in it that you want to cry and laugh.

Alexandra Mitlyanskaya created a video series of desert landscapes in the style of artist Edmund Burke, who equated the desert landscape with “sublime horror.” These are the types of views that Mitlyanskaya “paints”. Before us is an endless field, over which hangs a gray sky, or an endless sea, where water merges with the sky. Or a landscape overlooking pure dirt. But suddenly some living detail appears in this emptiness, be it an observation tower or a cow, and the terrifying emptiness immediately ceases to frighten. It contains that very dear fragment that can be found in the drawings of Nina Kotel and photographs of Evgenia Solomatina.