Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presents an exhibition by the St. Petersburg based artist Maxim Morgunov whose painterly practice serves as a method of observation of the constantly changing world
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An artist portraying nature as an animate system
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Landscape paintings evoking both actual scenery and abstract fantasies about imaginary worlds
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A chance to cast aside one’s cares and sink into calm contemplation of fluent matter
Is the genre of landscape painting still relevant in the 21st century? Undoubtedly so. One only needs to consider how a modern man of scientific thinking perceives the beauty of nature.
According to a famous quote, matter is an ‘objective reality which is given to man by his sensations,’ observed through sensory perception, and – sometimes – with the aid of scientific instrumentation. Let us suppose that painting is one of such methods of observation. Contemplation of an acrylic-layered canvas or furrowed bark of a tree is almost like a scientific experiment triggering chemical reactions in the brain. Our emotions are conditioned by what we are looking at and have a purely material underlayer closely connected to the world around us.
As we all know, apart from mountains, oceans, and the starry sky above us, there also exist physical fields, plasma, dark matter, and the like. Thus the tree is no longer just a tree, but an animate, constantly changing substance whose every particle is linked to the Universe.
Maxim Morgunov has been attentively scrutinising the world for his entire life, as painter and as teacher. In his explorations, colour is always treated as a kind of highly evolved matter capable of self-organising. In the laboratory setting of his studio, the artist reassembles fragments of the fabric of existence to help us feel one with the nature.
Maxim Morgunov was born in Leningrad in 1981 and graduated from the Boris Ioganson Art School in 1999 and the Russian Academy of Arts’ Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (class of Andrey Mylnikov) in 2005.
Long-time teacher at the Repin Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, he also co-founded the ProArt art school. In 2017, Morgunov completed an internship programme at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (Naples, Italy). The artist is a visiting professor at the Northwest University for Nationalities (Lanzhou, China).
Member of the St. Petersburg Artists’ Union and the St. Petersburg Painters’ Guild, Maxim Morgunov took part in more than 100 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. His works are in numerous state and private collections domestically and internationally. The artist was among the winners of the 2024 Erarta Prize.
