“Poignant landscapes with indispensable font inscriptions” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich tells what works of the artist are presented as part of the exhibition “Celestial Geography, or Debriefing by Andrei Filippov.”

A year ago, the consequences of the pandemic took away from us a wonderful person, an excellent friend and one of the main representatives of the younger generation of Moscow conceptualists, Andrei Filippov (1959-2022). He was very talented and easy to communicate, which cannot always be said about artists.

My old friend Elena Kuprina, the founder of the famous Moscow gallery “EKArtBuro”, was involved in his work. She initiated and curated the largest retrospective of Andrei Filippov at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, entitled “Celestial Geography, or Debriefing of Andrei Filippov.”

In eight halls on two floors of the foundation premises, which, as everyone knows, is located in the very center, at the beginning of Lubyanka Street, more than 100 works of the artist are presented, from the collections of his family, the Ekaterina Foundation itself, the Stella Art Foundation, E.K. .ArtBuro”, auction house Vladey and 10 other different private collections. I admit, I have never seen so many of Andrei’s works. And no one, probably, except Lena Kuprina.

Andrei graduated from the production department of the Moscow Art Theater School in 1981 (he is an art director by training) and almost immediately became one of the leaders of the so-called Moscow Young Conceptualism. By the way, the earliest work in the exhibition is “Self-Portrait” from 1978. Definitely no one had seen her before. Or a painting from approximately the same period – “Three Heroes”. As usual, among conceptual postmodernists Vasnetsov’s heroes are presented on horses, but with the faces of the “communist trinity” – Lenin-Marx-Engels.

And, of course, Andrei’s traditional images of imperial eagles. And piercing landscapes with the inevitable font inscriptions: “The Catcher in the Rye” in a winter Shishkino landscape, “Lord” in hyperrealistic clouds, Homo homini lupus est with a she-wolf and puppies suckling her.

Another friend of mine, Yuri Avvakumov, became the architect of the exhibition. And a documentary film with friends’ memories of Andrei was created by another friend, Marie Sokol. In general, my friends don’t do bad projects – we have to go!