ANDREI MOLODKIN
LIQUID BLACK AFTER LIQUID SKY
OPENING: Friday, September 19, 2008, from 6 to 9 p.m.
START: September 19, from 6 to 9 p.m. / September 20-21, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
EXHIBITION DATES: From September 23 through November 15 2008
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday from 1 to 7:30 p.m.
Galleria Pack is proud to present Liquid Black After Liquid Sky, a new exhibition by the young Russian artist Andrei Molodkin. Already recognized as one of the key young artists on the Russian contemporary art scene thanks to his transparent Plexiglas structures filled with oil, Molodkin has proven adept at ably mixing aesthetic standards and concepts of order and anarchy connected with the political sphere. He will be creating new artwork specifically for this personal exhibition in Milan.
The title of the exhibition, drawn from the 1980s film Liquid Sky by Russian director Slava Tsukerman, refers to a famous sentence in the movie when one of the film's protagonists, shooting heroin into his arm, says: "The sky is liquid: the key to paradise, milk from paradise." By choosing this title, Molodkin is suggesting that in the minds of people and in the world's geopolitical equilibrium on the whole, the place that once belonged to heroin, or Liquid Sky, during the 1970s and 1980s.
Molodkin's artwork often refer to the use of words and phrases like "Democracy," "In God We Trust," "Capitalism," and others that remind people of the way in which the majority of oil-producing countries are not democratic states in the least, and that strategic interests connected with the extraction of black gold precede any discussion about democracy that is underway or even planned, as is the paradigmatic case with Iraq.
This is the case with "Jesus and Mohammed," a work of art in which, through a series of tubes and pumps, the two Plexiglas statues exchange their respective fluids. Ironically, the Muslim oil darkens the veins of the Christian prophet.
In the world's grand global scenarios, sometimes it becomes difficult to understand whether political or economic forces are in control, since individual governments' responsibilities are diluted through the countless cash transfers and input from the market's most important financial funds. In a certain sense, while considering the "transfusions of democracy," in Western countries, we can't really be sure who's donating blood and who's receiving. When we look at the flow back and forth of the liquid produced by the pumps in the sculpture, the entire blood metaphor becomes immediately comprehensible.
Oil is the earth's blood, a toxic liquid that poisons the world's economy. It is a drug for which demand will always exceed supply, and its pipelines are the arteries through which every individual country obtains its own dose. In the sculpture, oil contaminates and transforms into parasites the forms and names that have been emptied of their meaning, and whose economic, media and political values now depend on the price of a barrel of oil. Oil is not kept alive by nations. In the same way in which it fills the empty body of the sculpture, the black liquid imposes its own powerful laws on the market. Its viscosity seems to make it capable of snaking its way anywhere and into anything, penetrating every sphere of human activity.
Andrei Molodkin was born in St. Petersburg, in Russia, in 1966. Today he lives and works in Paris and Moscow. His artwork can be found in important public and private collections including: the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg; the Sigmund Freud Museum in St. Petersburg; and the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow.
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