Big banners with the emblem of Angel Orensanz's exhibition "Earth: Death-Birth" festoon the compound that makes the Pushkin Museum in the Arbat. Thousands of visitors stop to have a glimpse at the banners and read the basics of what promises to be a major show. This is the first show in a Moscow museum of the work of leading contemporary artist, Spanish born Angel Orensanz's "Earth: Death-Birth". The show fills the three rooms ofthe exhibition hall of the Pushkin Museum.
The exhibition consists of a host of
strongly poetic sculpture pieces that fly over the three spaces, while hige projections give context to those sculptures and arresting drawings in which Orensanz capture the drama of the Earth as grave and cradle of life. While the sculpture and drawings static the video projections insert the visitor into locations such as the banks of the River Omono in Northern Japan, the lakes of Central Park and the canals of Venice. This is a show worth of the imagination of the theatrical strategies of Mayakovsky or Meyerhold, the images of Kandinsky and Chagall and the power of Lissitzky.
The power of these images have already attracted the attention of Moscow, even before the opening May 3. The City of Moscow has granted Orensanz a special disintction for his long term
contributions to the art life of the city; as well as the National Association of Russian Artists and the Puskin Museum itself. In a recent conversation, Orensanz was remembering that the first opera he saw while a teenager, at the Teatro del Liceo de Barcelona, was "Eugene Onegin". Since then he has periodically visited Russia to enjoy and contribute art.
Angel Orensanz if a well known sculptor and painter, and for the last ten years he has developed a critically appreciated body of video and film. In the show at the Puskin Museum, a collection of eight pieces from the Film and Video Library ofthe Museum of Modern Art in New York will be shown for the first time outside ofthe USA. A fully illustrated catalogue will be available and the artist will answear questions from the press and the public.
The show will close on May 30, and then will travel to the Rumyantsev Palace in St. Petersburg, under the auspices of the Russian Museum where it will be on view until the end of June.
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