Dmitry Gutov: "In Our Days, Everything Seems Pregnant With Its Contrary"

Opening: Sunday, September 12, 6 - 8pm

Exhibition Dates: September 12 - October 31, 2010

Scaramouche is pleased to present a solo exhibition by prominent Moscow-based artist Dmitry Gutov, his first in a New York gallery. In Our Days, Everything Seems Pregnant with its Contrary features a new collection of tall, plinth-like canvases marked by theses from Karl Marx's People's Paper, Grundrisse, and other publications and speeches. With typography reminiscent of El Lissitzky's poster designs and other Constructivist propaganda, Gutov resuscitates the fertile but brief avant-garde legacy of Leninist Russia only to abstract it. Breaking, fragmenting, and otherwise layering text, Gutov's stylization both obscures and highlights his Communist source material, an apt painterly manifestation of an ephemeral moment in Soviet history when society was both class-less and post-capitalist. Complemented by a group of smaller paintings in the project space, along with an accompanying audio component, In Our Days, Everything Seems Pregnant with its Contrary is only the latest development for an artist concerned with this Soviet epoch; it must, in Gutov's words, be "pieced together again from fragments, from feeble traces in the ruins, from scraps, intimations and shadows."

Dmitry Gutov studied at the Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, Moscow and the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Saint Petersburg. Recent solo exhibitions include Death and the Artist at M&J Guelman Gallery, Moscow, and The Deep Blue Colour of His Skin Shows Just How Self-Absorbed He Is at Matthew Bown Gallery, London. Notable group exhibitions include The Potosi Principle, on view now at Reina Sofia National Museum and Art Center, Madrid; Thaw: Russian Art, From Glasnost to the Present at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York; History of Russian Video Art: Chapter 2 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany; Think with the Senses-Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Russia! at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Upcoming exhibitions include Modernikon, Contemporary Art From Russia at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, curated by Francesco Bonami and Irene Calderoni, and Counterpoint, Contemporary Russian Art- From the Icon to the Avant-Garde by way of the Museum, curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Pauline Guelaud at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.