PAGAN. Elena Elagina & Igor Makarevich | Warsaw Galery Weekend opening

In Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich’s project, the spiral form of the unrealised Monument to the Communist International rises on the red cap of a large fly agaric mushroom, and fungi grow out of the white, soaring architectons. Combining hallucinogenic mushrooms with visions of constructivist experimentation and metaphysical suprematism, the artists discover irrational impulses both in the utopias of the heroic avant-garde and in contemporary references to its legacy. Interested in myths and mythmaking, Elagina and Makarevich examine the popularity of avant-garde aesthetics in the contemporary iconosphere. Fly agarics with their narcotic properties become in the artists’ project a visual metaphor of the irrationality of the delirious visions of post-revolutionary Moscow architecture and the no less hallucinatory forms of new buildings (popping up like mushrooms) in the capital of the Russian empire.

Presented at the Profile Foundation, a new version of the installationMushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde is yet another humorous take by Elagina and Makarevich on the past and its contemporary interpretations.

The huge fly agaric with Tatlin’s tower and the mushrooms on Malevich’s architectons may be referred to the ways in which iconic works of the Russian avant-garde function in contemporary culture. In their joint projects, the two artists hearken back to avant-garde art, grand utopias and Soviet history, commenting ironically on the redistribution of myths in the creation of present-day Russian culture.

Curators: Bożena Czubak, Natalia Goncharova