The pop/off/art gallery presents a solo exhibition by Rostislav Lebedev, a classic of contemporary art and one of the founders of the Sots Art movement, titled Requiem for Modernism, marking the artist's 80th birthday. The project engages with the legacy of modernism through more than 30 new paintings.

Requiem for Modernism is a statement built on the foundation of Lebedev's recognizable approaches and techniques: direct quotation, ironic appropriation, and parodic rethinking of canonical images from Russian and world painting. Lebedev is not so much bidding farewell to modernism as entering into a dialogue with it as an equal — provocative, sharp, but invariably attentive. In some works, text plays a special role: embedded into the pictorial field, it becomes an independent artistic gesture, a commentary, and at the same time another layer of quotation.

The exhibition weaves together three thematic lines: reinterpreting the pillars of Russian art, montage and hybridization within the foreign painting system, and playing with the tools of Soviet agitation. Within the dialogue with the Russian painting tradition, the artist turns to iconic images and techniques of the Russian avant-garde, above all the legacy of Kazimir Malevich, subjecting Suprematist constructions to ironic rethinking. Geometry as ideology, form as manifesto — Lebedev lays bare the modernist project's claims to universality, without denying its grandeur. In parallel, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Roy Lichtenstein, and Pablo Picasso become the artist's interlocutors, whose images and techniques he consciously borrows, supplementing them with parodic elements. Surrealist logic and Fauvist sensibility are refracted through Lebedev's method — recognizable, sharp, and precise. Quoting rhetorical clichés of agitprop art allows Lebedev to embed them into a painterly context, exposing the mechanisms of ideological influence, which remain relevant even today.

The three sections of the exhibition come together as a single "requiem," in which irony, admiration, and a question about the fate of art and its place in our lives all resound.

Rostislav Lebedev is a Soviet and Russian artist, one of the founders of the Sots Art movement, which emerged in the 1970s as a trend within unofficial art. Over several decades, the visual range of Lebedev's works has changed repeatedly. Nevertheless, he has remained faithful to his critical and ironic method: he was among the first to introduce reflexive references to the artistic practice of his contemporaries and compatriots. He can rightly be considered one of the creators of the postmodernist method in Russian art.

Rostislav Lebedev was born in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (Faculty of Fine Arts and Graphic Design) in 1969. At the turn of the 1970s, he joined a circle of artists later known as the "Rogov Street group" — named after the location of the studio of one of them, Boris Orlov (the group also included Dmitry A. Prigov, Igor Shelkovsky, and others). In the atmosphere of several creative studios and apartment shows in the first half of the 1970s, a method of "meta-art" was developed, which became the basis of Sots Art — a movement with which a number of Moscow artists subsequently identified themselves (besides B. Orlov and R. Lebedev, these include, above all, A. Kosolapov and L. Sokov, as well as D. Prigov and V. Bakchanyan; the term itself was coined by the artist duo V. Komar and A. Melamid, who applied it to their exhibition in 1972).