The gallery Form & Bronze participated in the contemporary art fair ArtRussia 2024 in Moscow. 15 of the works presented at the gallery's booth were new, created specifically for the fair. In addition to the familiar artists and sculptors of Form & Bronze, the gallery introduced new authors, including the young talented Mongolian sculptor Sanchir, who despite his age has already achieved international fame. For the first time, the gallery exhibited the works of the master sculptor from Krasnodar, Viktor Mosielev, who attracted crowds of fair visitors with his works and stories about his art. His collaboration with the gallery began with a victory in the Form & Bronze competition-festival dedicated to ballet.
The traditional interest of fair guests was drawn to the works of Arsen Avetissian and Aramare Vecchio. Organizers, buyers, and visitors noted the skillful compositional solution of the booth, stylish presentation, and interesting content.
When the very first Art Russia fair took place, the gallery Form & Bronze was the only one representing sculpture. Now, almost every booth features samples of sculptural art, where the gallery's work played a significant role, although Form & Bronze still leads in both quantity and quality of bronze sculpture works. Sculpture is increasingly capturing the interest of a wide audience and art enthusiasts. More and more people, including many young ones, are willing to acquire sculpture, harmoniously feel it in their interior, and even collect it.
The secret of Form & Bronze lies not only in the high-quality selection of artistic works but also in the fact that every project of the gallery, every exhibition or booth display is not just a presentation of specific authors and their works, but a creative practical exploration of contemporary sculpture trends and symbolic meanings created by the gallery's authors in their artistic worlds. This was demonstrated by the booth display at Art Russia, or rather booths because in reality, the gallery occupied two booths, each built according to its own concept.
The basis of the first booth's display was the ideas of Hedonism (enjoyment of life), Love, and Beauty. The keynote here was the works of Arsen Avetissian, which convey both a universal, timeless pure sensual impulse and a cultured tradition of festive perception of existence - a carnival theatrical world of masks, jesters, kings, queens, and harlequins.
A special touch to the concept was added by Andrey Belle's original canon of female beauty in painting and sculpture. Fragile beautiful girls, entirely earthly, daughters of Eve with all her temptations, who love freedom and are in harmony with nature and its gifts. Slightly too thin, refined, elongated, like in mannerist paintings or in Serov's portrait of Ida Rubinstein. It seems like they grew up in some parallel land that differs from ours only in having weaker gravity.
The concept of the second booth was built around the interaction of Movement and Stillness. In Sanchir's work, everything moves, boils, seethes: jumps, struggles, dances. Allegorically, his creativity can be imagined as a hot steed racing across the Mongolian steppe. In Viktor Mosielev's works, the flowing jagged form seems to burst inward, deconstructs and rebuilds itself, seething in an internal crucible.
The Pole of Stillness is represented by Sergey Ostashov's works. A man living in symbiosis with plants, like them, immersed in quiet meditation: from half-sleep to absolute Buddhist nirvana. The balance between the two poles is embodied in Sergey Kondrashkin's bronze lion. On one hand, it refers to the stone lions of St. Petersburg but made from living bronze; it represents not statues in an architectural ensemble but the flesh and blood of a real savanna king. The animal monarch is in a state of rest - on the border between Movement and Stillness; he seems to condense energy around him; his muscles hum like a charged electric battery.
