Imitation is everywhere: from birth, when an infant mimics their parents’ facial expressions, and later sounds and words, and later, when our mirror neurons compel us, sometimes unconsciously, to copy speech patterns, movements, or smiles and yawns in response to the behavior of others. Humans have achieved great heights in imitating living and inanimate nature: marbled paintings have decorated homes and religious sites since ancient times, artificial caviar and “fish” are still served on holiday tables today, plastic furniture imitates wood, and inexpensive jewelry pretends to be gold.

The very word “art” suggests something unreal, artificial. The more skilled the artist, the more their work amazes the viewer: illusory landscapes, the sea elements that make you “hear” the lapping of waves, delicate lace and velvet, flushed cheeks and the moist gleam of eyes. Artists of the past, masters of deception, intrigue us even today. Copyists like Wolfgang Beltracchi, Elmyr de Hory, and Han van Meegeren, who passed off their paintings as Vermeer and Modigliani, were so brilliant that their works are now valued in their own right and fetch enormous prices at auction.

The exhibition’s curatorial concept is to analyze, assimilate, and rework foreign artistic language. The artists creatively reinterpret the figurative and figurative systems of their colleagues, teachers, and inspirations. But is it enough to simply replicate a pictorial or compositional technique, or is the artistic path, time of creation, context, and charisma of the artist being “dissected” the true essence that cannot be counterfeited? Or perhaps an outside perspective can bring something new to the original language, and with its help, create an even better work?

Exhibition participants: Ivan Avaliani, Olga Bozhko, Dmitry Bulnygin, Dmitry Kavka, Lyudmila Konstantinova, Irina Korina, Daria Krotova, Maxim Ksuta, Nina Kuzmina, Rostan Tavasiev, Galina Smirnskaya, Natalia Struchkova, Timofey Yarzhombek.

Curator: Lyudmila Konstantinova