Pop/off/art Gallery presents the group project Rooms, which addresses the theme of home and the artist’s “place of habitation.” The project brings together works by eighteen gallery residents—ranging from undisputed classics of Russian art and key figures of the art scene to vibrant emerging authors.

Artists often use images of familiar walls, interior objects, windows, and doors as a reference or template for creating a work—the interest in this theme stems from the variety of approaches to capturing the space around them. The project seeks to pinpoint the place of residence and to define where meaningful domestic description ends and an uncontrolled, spontaneous incorporation of reality begins. What intrigues us is not so much the working area or studio, but rather the living space of a person inextricably linked to art.

The exhibition will feature previously unexhibited figurative works by Evgeny Mikhnov‑Voytenko, unique pieces from the 1980s by Vladimir Kupriyanov and Mikhail Roginsky, early works by Vitaly Pushnitsky and Olga Tatarintseva, paintings by Andrey Krasulin from his emigration period, as well as works created specially for the show by Mikhail Levius, Alexander Mortaev, Vika Begalskaya, and Alexander Vilkin. Viewers will find themselves in nineteen different rooms, each referring to a distinct location around the world—every one of which, at some point, was imprinted on history through artistic will.

Nikolay Kasatkin captures his own reflection in the window of a house in the village of Vorontsovo, Smolensk region, where he returned every summer for thirteen years; Mikhail Roginsky, having just emigrated to France, begins to feel nostalgia for his parents’ Moscow apartment; Irina Nakhova, in her Room No. 1, explores the duality of the apartment for unofficial artists—as both a refuge for the intelligentsia and a place of confinement; for Albert Soldatov and Shamil Shaaev, working within a domestic interior is a way of interacting with and transforming everyday life, while for Polina Rukavichkina it raises the question of the boundary between the alien and one’s own.

The project brings together over twenty works in a variety of media, from video and photography to painting, graphics, and installation. From a Soviet kitchen to a temporary dwelling, from a documentary perspective to metaphor, the exhibition Rooms does not illustrate the theme of home but rather investigates the mechanism by which real living space turns into an artistic image.

Artists in the exhibition: Vika Begalskaya & Alexander Vilkin, Nikolay Kasatkin, Andrey Krasulin, Vladimir Kupriyanov, Mikhail Levius, Evgeny Mikhnov‑Voytenko, Alexander Mortaev, Irina Nakhova, Ivan Novikov, Ivan Plyushch, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Mikhail Roginsky, Polina Rukavichkina, Albert Soldatov, Olga Tatarintseva, Shamil Shaaev.