October has awarded Moscow with gloomy weather typical of the month, and residents dope into their everyday lives, also becoming indistinguishable from each other. But succumbing to melancholy is not the way we choose. Instead, let’s refer to contemporary artists–their delicate taste and subtle mental organization are calling us to look to the outer world and the routine of everyday life in a more meaningful way.

They seem to say: “Pay more attention to the person at the next table at the café, be attentive while looking at the window even if the view hasn’t changed for the last five years, let your imagination run wild, let the world sparkle with new colors! Autumnal colors or, well, ones that you want.”

Where: Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Gogol, 10)

When: November 13

Stephan Balkenhol. The Sculptures and Reliefs

The average person in average circumstances. This is the main character of the sculptures and reliefs by German artist Stephan Balkenhol. Just a man of indeterminate age wearing a white shirt and a dark sweater. Isn’t it too simple? Apparently not. Perhaps precisely because of the detached manner of the artist’s style we are able to see something humanic and warm in the impersonal images of his artworks.

Balkenhol’s sculptures are made of wood–it’s a sort of continuation of the old European tradition, but a little bit in a new way, just like those small sculptures representing sacred subjects acted out by townsfolk. You might agree, it’s not so often that we think of the implication of our everyday existence. So now we have to.

Where: Moscow Museum of Modern Art

When: Until November 13

Albert Marquet. A Wide-open Window

So, tell me, what is more interesting: to look out the window or at a mobile screen? I suspect that those who have not played a cunning trick, would give preference to an electronic friend. Say, what can be interesting in the landscape outside the window? But for most his life, the French artist Albert Marquet has painted the same view seen from the window of his studio. But every time the picture turned out so differently that someone unaware never would have guessed it. Of course, sometimes Marquet traveled, but even then he painted views… now from the hotel window.

However, not only those artworks are presented in Moscow’s Marquet exhibition. There are also some other works by the author, as well as paintings of his Russian fans. Yet the idea of subtle changes in a seemingly static picture outside the window is perhaps the most relevant for the modern viewer, a resident of the city, steeped in the routine and therefore bored, hoping to find something new and exciting on the screen of a tablet, while he should just look out the window…

Where: Art Gallery of European and American XIX-XX centuries

When: Until January 8

Robert Longo. Testimonies

Robert Longo, an artist and director, author of the legendary “Johnny Mnemonic,” a film about a cyber-future in which the human brain becomes the guardian, the driver, the operator and the only reliable courier of information. At the “Testimonies” exhibition you don’t become a courier, but you get a lot of food for thought. In an unequal battle, there meets three heavyweights: Sergei Eisenstein, Francisco Goya, and Robert Longo–representatives of the various eras and continents, adherents of various dogmas and different techniques and technologies.





What is common to them is the desire to go beyond the facts and documenting reality through drawing, and look at the everyday life as a starting point. But where the fantasy will lead them, what sparks of meaning will be carved from this mounting collision of times and styles, no one knows. The audience–“witnesses” of the exhibition–have to answer.

Where: Museum of Modern Art “Garage”

When: Until February 5