Spring. Ruins and Renaissance

A new art space has opened at the Grand Hotel Moika 22 – the Tea Lounge features works by three artists: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pavel Shillingovsky, and Egor Ostrov. The concept and curation are by art historian Vasily Uspensky.

The project's idea harks back to the famous Roman artistic cafes, whose walls are adorned with numerous works of art. The oldest such establishment, Caffè Greco, was frequented by Gogol and Goethe, Stendhal and Joyce, Nietzsche and Orson Welles. Located in a tourist quarter, the cafe became a meeting place for contemplating what was seen in the Eternal City. The ruins of ancient Roman buildings, which provided an opportunity to reflect on the fate of civilizations, the rise, fall, and rebirth of empires, and the eternity of art, were often the subject of conversation. The starting point for the exhibition at Grand Hotel Moika 22 is also Roman ruins, captured in original prints by the famous 18th-century engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who managed to imbue the remains of ancient structures with a special grandeur, a timeless, cosmological resonance.

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

The works of our contemporary Egor Ostrov, whose art is based on interpreting classical art, take the reflection on the connection of times to a new level. Images of the divine Raphael, the "Russian Italian" Bryullov, and the singer of ruins Piranesi are interpreted by him in a special authorial technique where digital art merges with meticulous manual labor, and the past with the present. Lines of halftone, sometimes thickening, sometimes narrowing, do not outline forms but hint at them. Possessing a special absorbing, hypnotic effect, Egor Ostrov's works encourage the gaze of the modern viewer, accustomed to the flickering of information flow, to switch to a different, meditative, and thoughtful mode. The central object of the exhibition is Ostrov's interpretation of Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola," an old copy of which adorns the main hall of the Grand Hotel Moika 22.

Exhibited together in the first days of spring, these works are meant to give hotel guests grounds for their own reflections – on Rome and Petersburg, eternity and modernity, ruins and Renaissance.