Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Letdown, a solo exhibition of Sanya Kantarovsky which will include existing and new works produced specifically for the occasion.
\nKantarovsky, who was born in Moscow in 1982 and emigrated to the United States as child, has often used his work to measure his experience living under communism in the waining years of the Soviet Union against his experiences in the Western world. Using architecture as a both a metaphor and a framing device, the exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo renders these two aesthetic and political polarities in high relief, setting a stage for a new body of paintings which transmit a range of unsavory and brutal experiences.<\/p>\n
There are tens of thousands of the same building in Russia, each containing eighty apartments. They were designed by consensus \u2013 a committee of architects determined a standard of living and trimmed it down to its most essential pillars. These structures were referred to as K-7s or Khruchevki, after Nikita Khrushchev, who hastily commissioned them in response to a severe housing shortage. Built cheaply and quickly throughout Russia from pre-fabricated panels of cast concrete, they thrust their occupants, both physically and mentally, into an endlessly replicable, uniform space.<\/p>\n
Kantarovsky\u2019s exhibition unfolds in front of a painted image of a half demolished Khrushchyovka. Filling the Foundation\u2019s austere minimalist space \u2013 designed by architect Claudio Silvestrin \u2013 the mural inadvertently measures a high form of contemporary architecture against the economy and violence of Soviet public housing. Kantarovsky\u2019s paintings hang atop the housing block, their rectilinear frames echoing the building\u2019s tiled slab fa\u00e7ade.These paintings are themselves a geometric frame for brutality\u2013 full of painful, doubt-ridden and feeble experiences, bodies contorted in submission. Each is its own prefabricated arena for pushing, pulling, abrading, rinsing and erasing.<\/p>\n
The presence of the Khrushchyovka, along with the steel playground turtles \u2013 cherepashki \u2013 that often accompanied them, gives the impression that these paintings could be windows into a claustrophobic home or tears in a social fabric. Are the figures within tenants of the building? A mother\u2019s child, leaden and flush with rosacea, causes her to stoop to the point of falling as he reaches for the last drops of her milk. Her frame buckles; her scraped knees indicating that it isn\u2019t the first time. This painting shares its title, \u201cLetdown\u201d, with the exhibition as a whole. At odds with itself, like many of its counterparts, \u2018letdown\u2019 refers to oppositional emotions: a letdown being both a disappointment and a release of breast milk in a nursing mother. This paradoxical simultaneity of dismay and fulfillment assembles as the central theme of the exhibition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Letdown, a solo exhibition of Sanya Kantarovsky which will include existing and new works produced specifically for the occasion. Kantarovsky, who was born in Moscow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25300,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"Sanya Kantarovsky. Letdown","_seopress_titles_desc":"Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo","_seopress_robots_index":"","show_footer_widget":true,"show_related_exhibition":true,"related_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"mostre":[],"m_author":[],"m_venue":[439],"class_list":["post-25240","mostre","type-mostre","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","m_venue-fondazione-sandretto-re-rebaudengo-torino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/25240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/mostre"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/25240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48069,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre\/25240\/revisions\/48069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"mostre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mostre?post=25240"},{"taxonomy":"m_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_author?post=25240"},{"taxonomy":"m_venue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fsrr.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_venue?post=25240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}