Avant-garde stationary

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2015

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This is the general idea of an office - a set of stationery items that are of no use. And this is one of the main topoi of avant-garde art, of modernist art - the creation of things which cannot be used in any practical way, which can also be called "broken things".

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The new project by Anatoly Osmolovsky looks at a metaphorical piece of stationary to deny its practical properties with a dose of irony.

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The details found in the exhibited objects are referencing outlook of the stationeries that remained unchanged throughout decades and got engraved in the memory of a post-soviet person.

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There are references to be found in the objects of the "Avant-garde stationary" linking it to the milestones of the artist's practice. The new series of wooden rulers develops on one of the first projects to mark transition from non-spectacular to object-art in Osmolovsky's oeuvre - a set of two aluminum rulers titled "New standard" (2002). Paper was also chosen as a medium for an "object art" series

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"Tickets to paradise" (2006) devoted to the protest against monetisation of benefits. And, at last, the shape of the faux-leather folders - military tanks freed from all the details and the gun - is one of the most significant in the context of the artist's sculptural practices. The project is also executed according to Osmolovsky's key principal of series production: each object is a part of a series of other similar ones, which puts it in an ambivalent position between uniqueness and reproducibility.

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