Maxim Kantor
Atlantis
Curated by Alexander Borovski and Cristina Barbano
01.05.2013>15.09.2013
TUESDAY-SUNDAY: 10.00 TO 18.00
Palazzo Zenobio
Collegio Armeno
Fondamenta del Soccorso
Dorsoduro 2596
30123 Venice Italy
041 5234348
www.officinadellezattere.it
One of the world’s best known artists, Maxim Kantor is a Russian painter, engraver, writer and essayist. He is making his return to Venice with the “Atlantis” exhibit.
A site-specific exhibit dedicated to Maxim Kantor’s most recent artistic output is being hosted in the 18th-century halls of Palazzo Zenobio and is presented by curators Alexander Borovski (Manager of the Contemporary Art Section of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia) and Cristina Barbano (curator and supervisor of the artist’s projects in Italy) with the collaboration of the Palazzo’s Artistic Director Marco Agostinelli. This stage of the artist’s career is charged with the desire to link crises of both present day and past civilizations with Plato’s legendary island of Atlantis by demonstrating how the sinking of a flourishing civilization can be a philosophical and figurative reference point for the collapse of the “great utopias”.
The current state of Western civilization is perceived by the artist as a historical low tide which inevitably will be followed by a forceful and threatening high tide made up of wars and revolutions.
If throughout the history of Western thought Plato’s image of the Island of Atlantis sinking (the original mould of ancestral anguish) represents critical reflections upon the destiny of our civilization, these same reflections find their expression in the history of art through visual representations of imaginary or historical events which have taken place during many different eras such as the story of the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Pompeii, the construction of Tatlin’s Tower or the catastrophe of the Twin Towers – all of which are symbols of the vanity of grandiose projects, the finitude of human efforts and history’s cyclical rhythm. Taking its cue from these visions, the first portion of the exhibit focuses upon the image of a tower-state.
In a separate area, Kantor presents outstanding characters from the past 150 years of Western history. Small portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, Mussolini, Sarkozy, Putin and Obama are featured – often with a satirical connotation: these are the ideologists and politicians who inspired the conception of social development like a clay-based Atlantis.
Other halls are dedicated to the Ocean from which Atlantis came into being and met its demise – an Ocean that is almost personified and captured in its every aspect: from the deadest calm to the most violent storm, from the long, sandy beaches to the lighthouse and from the low tides revealing its mysteries at the ocean bottom to its violent and impetuous high tides.
