OVCHARENKO presents Ivan Razumov's personal project "Museum Exhibition. Part 1. Appropriation and Reconstruction" in which the artist brings new life to the iconic paintings of Isaac Levitan, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, Vasily Surikov, and other Russian artists.

"Museum Exhibition" is an imaginary museum space where classic works interact with each other. The characters and themes of famous paintings move between the paintings, changing their roles and context. Lenin moves from one of Isaac Brodsky's paintings to another of his Leninist paintings. Surikov's Suvorov and his soldiers soar above Repin's underwater world, which lulls Sadko to sleep. Viktor Vasnetsov's "The Knight at the Crossroads" also leaves the canvas, becoming a spectator himself. The characters disappear from "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan," leaving only an empty space of tragedy. However, they reappear on Vasnetsov's "The Flying Carpet" instead of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird. Levitan, painted by Serov, gazes melancholically from the clouds, hovering above the Eternal Peace.

The project combines the pictorial language of 19th-century Russian artists with a collage-like combination of technique and subject matter. The artist is a creator on the eve of a time of change, caught in the midst of Waltz's feast, and his brush is a prophecy that everything will be "calculated, weighed, and divided."

The inability to create a masterpiece in the sense that it existed at the end of the 19th century becomes an opportunity for the artist to explore the art of the era on the eve of great changes. He brings back the life and atmosphere of a time when art reflected a naive admiration for progress, hope for prosperity, and faith in the course of history.

Razumov approaches the technique of oil painting as it was at the end of the Belle Époque. He works in layers, carefully balancing the colorful surfaces, and relies on the academic school of oil painting that he learned at the Surikov Institute and from his uncle's teachings. This tradition is deeply rooted in the artist's family background. Ivan Razumov grew up in a family of artists. His grandfather, Fyodor Konstantinov, was a well-known Soviet illustrator, and his uncle, Vladimir Lykov, was a set designer for popular films and television plays of the 1970s and 1980s, including "The Adventures of Elektronik" and "The Sorcerers."

Ivan Razumov's project is a frozen fairy tale of the history of academic art in the late 19th century, which crumbles into puzzles that both the artist and the viewer must reassemble, recognizing the compositional matrices with precision. 

About the artist
Ivan Razumov is a Russian painter, graphic artist and illustrator. The artist's style was shaped by the influence of the classical Soviet school of graphics of the 1930s. In 1997, Razumov began working on printed illustrations for periodicals and classics of literature (works by M. Basho, V.V. Mayakovsky, A.S. Pushkin, V.A. Shenderovich, etc.). The artist transferred the techniques of graphics and book illustration to painting, hence the specific construction of the composition, the surreal shift in scale, and the vivid color. In 1995–2002, he was part of St. Petersburg's artistic circles, collaborating with Timur Novikov, Sergey Bugaev-Afrika, and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. He created covers and illustrated articles for the psychoanalytic magazine "Kabinet" by Viktor Mazin.

In the 2000s, after returning to Moscow, he collaborated with Pavel Peppershtein on several graphic projects. Razumov's artworks are characterized by a clash, conflict, and eroticization of Soviet, new Russian, and Western European cultural images. The plots are based on allusions to cinematic and literary episodes, psychoanalytic theories, political and social events, and popular culture myths. His works are part of the collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad.