Exhibition “Voznesensky. More” to the 90th anniversary of the poet of the era at the Voznesensky Center

“More on! Let the “bastards”. Life is a painted egg! At least one more minute. Still – MORE!

Describing his installation “The Ipatiev Ballad”, Voznesensky said: “It seems that my life was not in vain, if only because I managed to save a piece of wooden lattice from destruction – the one that the murdered Romanovs looked at before death in the Ipatiev basement. It was she who reflected in their eyes. This is the only reliable relic left from that terrible night.”

Documents presented at the exhibition related to the installation “Russia is risen” turned out to be a major archival find. A metaphor that lasted for several years, embodied in several videos, two large installations, performances, concerts and poetry. One of the options for the video is an assemblage of a spoon and an eggshell, painted like a globe with a hole in the place of the USSR. This metaphor, in fact, is a multi-level monument to the event of the collapse of the USSR, created by Voznesensky.

“When we first started working with archives, we did not know what was waiting for us. We were so impressed and surprised by what we discovered in these archives that we wanted to share it as soon as possible. One of the results of our work was the exhibition “Voznesensky. More”. We decided to turn to that part of his work, which is less known to a wide audience. Still, the poet Voznesensky is well known, but not many people know that he was an architect by education and turned to a new genre of art in the 90s. He became interested in visual art, experimented in this area and came to no less talented works,” Olga Vartseva, director of the Voznesensky Center, “reported” to reporters.

One of the first exhibition “Voznesensky. More” watched: Victoria Markova – Chief Researcher of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Olga Zhuravleva – Director of the Tropinin Museum, Nina Ostrun – co-founder and director of the “International Origami Museum”, Alexei Yudin – Advisor to the General Director of the Library of Foreign Literature, Tatiana Metaksa – Advisor to the General Director of the Museum East.

The main visitor at the exhibition was the poet’s widow Zoya Boguslavskaya, who spoke a lot about certain artifacts, years and events. Rare documents and exhibits from the personal archive of the Voznesensky family are presented in three exhibition halls.

“He was an architect by education, and these architectural structures have always lived in him. Many of his poems acquired the character of a rhymed architectural work. Therefore, the difference between his many poems and what he came up with from others is precisely this ability to find a form that is a little different than just poetry, he has always lived in him, ”Zoya Boguslavskaya told media representatives.

Most of the exhibition is occupied by Voznesensky’s visual poetry, which he created during the 1990s. For the first time, the viewer will be able to look at sketches for famous videos and numerous drawings by the poet, which later became illustrations for his publications.

“Everyone says that my poetry is very visual and metaphorical. There is ideological dissent, which could still pass if you change the end or change something. Artistic dissent was always perceived with hostility. All this was connected with painting. The pictorial image ran parallel to the poetic. And when videos appeared, it became a kind of concentration of the poetic. Therefore, poets appear in the videos: Akhmatova, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam. This is an attempt to read the poet metaphorically, figuratively,” Andrey Andreevich himself said about his works.

The exposition reveals the artistic talent of Voznesensky, complementing his poetic gift, which is for centuries!

“In the archives of the late 70s, a huge number of drawings, palindrome sketches were found. It can be seen that Voznesensky was looking for and trying various visual solutions for his texts. And in the 80s, he seemed to have forgotten about the arts, and the books published during that period contain almost no illustrations. It seems that in the 80s he protected himself from art and went into the world of poetry, and in the 90s he begins to make video-works,” said the exhibition curator Dmitry Khvorostov, leading a tour for the first visitors.

Exhibition “Voznesensky. More” will be open until July 27.

Vladimir Sabadash, Anna Duhon.

Photo by Vladimir Sabadash