Anna Florkovskaya
Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov, Russia
In Moscow contemporary art of the 2000s religious subjects (connected with Christian tradition), both separate works and exhibition projects, take a noticeable place. The period of the 2000s can be defined as independent from the point of view of religious subjects’ evolution in Russian art of the 20th–21st centuries. The period from 1917 to the end of the 1980s, characterized by a ban on public exhibition of religious art, is replaced with the 1990s, when artists of different artistic directions including even the actual one, turn to religious subjects. At that time religious subjects were more often a reason for the art provocation; similar approach is characteristic for the 2010s. In this context interpretation of religious subjects in Moscow contemporary art of the 2000s differs from the previous period as there are attempts to start dialogue between actual art and the church as a public institute. A number of exhibition projects were made, such as “Deisis/Predstoyaniye”, 2004; “I Trust!”, “The evangelical project” by D. Vrubel and V. Timofeeva, 2008; “Dvoyesloviye / Dialogue”, 2010 and others. Of considerable interest are various interpretations of “images of the sacred” by the representatives of contemporary art: from manipulations with the iconographic images and symbols taken out of a semantic context of Christian tradition to experience of immersion in depths of personal experience and comprehension of a sacral image. Religious subjects in contemporary art of the 2000s are the experience of the appeal to the two-thousand-year cultural tradition capable of updating the modern art both on semantic and the formal level.