Spring. Ruins and Rebirth

A new art space has opened in the Grand Hotel Moika 22 – the Tea Room presents works by three artists: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pavel Shillingovsky and Egor Ostrov. The author of the concept and curator of the display is art critic Vasily Uspensky.

The idea of ​​the project goes back to the famous Roman artistic cafes, whose walls are decorated with numerous works of art. The oldest of such establishments, Caffè Greco, was visited by Gogol and Goethe, Stendhal and Joyce, Nietzsche and Orson Welles. Situated in the tourist district, the cafe became a place for meetings and reflection on what was seen in the Eternal City. The ruins of ancient Roman buildings often became the subject of discussions, giving rise to discussions about the fate of civilization, the rise, fall and revival of empires and the eternity of art. The starting point of the exhibition at the Grand Hotel Moika 22 was also the Roman ruins, captured in authentic prints by the famous 18th century engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who managed to give the remains of ancient buildings a special grandeur, a timeless, cosmological sound.

They are echoed by the sheets of Pavel Shillingovsky from the series "Petersburg. Ruins and Revival". Created in 1923, the woodcuts captured the city in a state of devastation after the cataclysms of the revolution and civil war. However, the artist was able to see in the fall of the former capital of the empire not only a special melancholic beauty, reminiscent of the ruins of antiquity, but also hope. In the preface to the series, Fyodor Bernshtam wrote: "Now we have spring, I want to believe that the period of destruction has come to an end, that a revival is beginning, a time of new construction, that Petersburg will be reborn like a phoenix..."

The works of our contemporary Yegor Ostrov, whose work is based on the interpretation of classical art, take the discussion of the connection of times to a new level. The images of the divine Raphael, the "Russian Italian" Bryullov and the singer of ruins Piranesi are interpreted by him in a special author's technique, in which digital art is combined with painstaking manual labor, and the past with the present. The thickening and narrowing lines of the raster do not outline the forms, but hint at them. Possessing a special addictive, hypnotizing effect, the works of Yegor Ostrov prompt the gaze of the modern viewer, accustomed to the flickering flow of information, to switch to a different, meditative and thoughtful mood. The central object of the exhibition is Ostrov's interpretation of Raphael's "Madonna in the Chair", an antique copy of which adorns the main hall of the Grand Hotel Moika 22.

Exhibited together in the first days of spring, these works are intended to give hotel guests food for their own reflections - about Rome and St. Petersburg, eternity and modernity, ruins and the Renaissance.