Avant-garde Stationery

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30 October — 6 December 2015
pop/off/art Gallery, Moscow

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“Avant-garde Stationery” explores the idea of the office as a system of objects stripped of their practical function. The project reflects one of the central topoi of avant-garde and modernist art — the creation of unusable, or “broken,” things.

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In this series, Anatoly Osmolovsky reconsiders stationery as a metaphorical object, deliberately denying its utilitarian properties with a degree of irony. The works incorporate visual elements deeply embedded in the collective memory of the post-Soviet experience: familiar forms of stationery that have remained largely unchanged over decades.

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The project also references key milestones in the artist’s practice. The series of wooden rulers develops ideas introduced in one of Osmolovsky’s early object-based works, New Standard (2002), a set of two aluminum rulers marking his transition from non-spectacular actions to object art. Paper as a medium recalls the series Tickets to Paradise (2006), which addressed protests against the monetisation of social benefits.

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The faux-leather folders — shaped like simplified military tanks stripped of detail and weaponry — connect to the artist’s sculptural language, where reduction and abstraction play a central role.

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Consistent with Osmolovsky’s principle of serial production, each object exists as part of a larger series of similar works, placing it in an ambivalent position between uniqueness and reproducibility.