The Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the pop/off/art gallery, presents the first retrospective solo exhibition in the Urals of Arkady Petrov—one of the most striking and extraordinary representatives of the "1970s" generation, whose work celebrated and immortalized the aesthetics of Soviet mass culture while developing within the framework of Sots Art, the Russian version of pop art.

The exhibition in the Great Exhibition Hall of the Hermitage-Ural Center will feature 128 paintings and sculptures by the artist from his studio and private collections in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Voronezh, on loan with the participation of the pop/off/art gallery. This exhibition is complemented by a highly significant work from the collection of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts (Ermitage Museum of Fine Arts, "Beauty with a Cat," 1984). The exhibition will introduce visitors to Arkady Petrov's creative biography, beginning with the early 1970s ("Factory," 1971; "Shift," 1971; "From the Face," 1971, etc.) and ending with his contemporary works ("Colored Mood," 2020; "Healing," 2020).

His childhood and adolescence, spent, as the artist himself put it, "at the edge of the world," played a fundamental role in the formation and development of his work. He was born in a small mining town, where the grayness and dreary dusty streets served as a backdrop to the colorful artifacts of the post-war years: beautiful but non-functioning fountains, garish oilcloth rugs with swans and decorative elephant figurines, postcards with generic greetings and ubiquitous slogans energetically calling for people to wash their hands before eating or to relax in southern health resorts.

Dancing to the accordion and fragrant bouquets of roses, lilacs, white acacia, and violets remained iconic symbols of the Soviet holiday in the artist's memory. These signs of the times united all Soviet people, regardless of the corner of the vast country in which they were born and lived. These were the starting point for Arkady Petrov's paintings: Soviet kitsch—tasteless, from the perspective of a modern Russian, consumer goods—is imbued in his works with a careful, reverent attitude and a poignant nostalgia for the glorious, bygone sincerity and naive desire to create comfort and beautify life amidst widespread shortages. Also from this same place, from his childhood, come the artist's favorite characters, which became archetypal images of men and women for him: sullen miners and curvaceous beauties, who have accompanied him throughout his creative life.

Since the 1980s, Arkady Petrov has also turned to politicized subjects. His canvases feature banners, profiles of leaders, communist slogans, images from propaganda posters, and the Moscow Kremlin, crowned with a red star as the main symbol of Soviet power (triptych "Peace. Labor," 1984; "Buttons," 1989; "Manifesto of the Communist Party," 2009–2011, etc.). Thus, by combining and reassembling images forever imprinted in his memory, the artist creates a unique anthology of the life of the ordinary Soviet person.