Exhibition "Beyond the Establishment"
“Beyond the Establishment” is an inclusive project of the Russian Museum and the first large-scale attempt to present the work of non-professional artists with mental disorders and / or psychiatric experience from an artistic point of view. Without diminishing the social significance of the exhibition, the aesthetic value of the artworks is in the foreground. The authors presented here express their personal attitude to the world through creativity, which fits well into the strategies of contemporary art, where the factor of professional artistic education has long ceased to prevail. First of all, these artists are distinguished by the lack of involvement in the art community, the art establishment and its marketing strategies, current discourse on art, etc.
The process of including such art into common artistic practice was launched at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the terms that arose decades ago have acquired new shades of meaning over time and now no longer seem to be either correct or accurate enough to describe the phenomenon in its entirety. This also applies to the two most common terms: art brut and Outsider Art. The title of this exhibition, Beyond the Establishment, does not solve terminological problems, but indicates the intersection point for the six artists represented here.
All exhibitors (Yulia Kosulnikova, Alexey Sakhnov, Alexey Barov, Ilgar Nadzhafov, Sergei Fedulov, Aleksander Savchenko) are independent artists with a recognizable style, original graphic and pictorial techniques, and each of them has an own moving theme at the heart of their creativity.
