The exhibition is the outcome of time spent by the artist Ivan Gorshkov in the workshops of the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production.
Generator of Happy Accidents
- Date:
- 12 Dec 2024–
30 Mar 2025
- Age restrictions
- 16+
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Ivan Gorshkov creates total installations, “incredible realities,” based on materials: what the work is made of is the starting point, setting the emotional background of the work and “shaping the vector of its perception by the viewer,” as the artist himself says.
Generator of Happy Accidents occurred to Ivan as an apt description of how a project develops in unexpected ways, depending on the behaviour of the material and its response to the tool. In this approach, the workshop becomes a research laboratory, and the creation of a work is an experiment with unpredictable results. For Ivan, the Vaults workshops were a laboratory, where happy accidents occurred with the help of high-tech machines.
Amazement is the first reaction upon encountering Gorshkov’s phantasmagorical world. Then comes a desire to understand how this world came about. Grooves created by a machine on the complex natural shape of a tree stump fold into an intricate pattern that merges organically into the texture of the wood, where it has no place to be. The effect is a glitch, the breakthrough of an artificial, digital form into a natural form. Once we go round the sculpture, we grasp how the abstract becomes figurative, how a tree stump becomes a fairy-tale character.
The artist calls his method “semi-abstract expressionism.” By combining different textures and forms in a single object, he decants his own visual language. The slabs on show at the exhibition hint at Flemish still lifes, but the food items are plastic fridge magnets. The trellised, densely arranged silk-screen works evoke salon exhibitions of the past centuries, but also the apartment shows of the Soviet underground.
Tree stumps, slabs, and silkscreens are visually united by their method of creation, which is collage and the superimposition of images. Ivan Gorshkov’s work can be understood as a subversion, an ironic play on the clichés of modern art. The objects that he creates entice and intrigue or frighten and repel, but, most of all, they evoke an emotional response, bringing artist and viewer closer together.
All photos: Daniel Annenkov
About the artist
Ivan Gorshkov (b. 1986) is interested in comprehending the cultural codes of the modern era, calling this process “the search for a crystal of the purest craziness.” He works in different techniques, seeking to expand the palette of his methods as much as possible, and using readymades. He considers endless remodelling (“find and improve”) as the basis of his artistic strategy.
Ivan graduated from Voronezh State Pedagogical University and founded the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art (2009–2018). He was a beneficiary of the grant programme at the Garage Museum of Modern Art in Moscow (2014). Accolades include Cosmoscow Artist of the Year (2017), winner of the 15th Innovation State Prize (2020), and Kandinsky Prize shortlist (2021). Ivan took part in the ColLab programme at the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production in 2022. Ivan’s works are in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and have participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Russia and abroad.
About the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production
The Vaults Centre for Artistic Production comprises eight workshops fitted out with equipment for experimenting with wood, metal, plastic, ceramics, textile, and other materials. The facilities are available for use by participants of the Centre’s programmes and master classes.
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Artist
Ivan Gorshkov
Curator
Olga Druzhinina
Architecture
Stepan Lukyanov
Producers
Alisa Kekelidze, Angelina Vorona
Lightning
Ksenia Kosaya
Head of the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production
Lyuda Frost
The Vaults producer
Anya Agafonova
The Vaults technical specialist
Dmitry Polyakov
Printmaking master
Artemiy Kulyomin
The Vaults junior technical specialist
Artur Kodochigov
Master in metal crafts, CNC machines, and 3D printers
Sergey Kalinin
KUKA robotic arm specialist
Aleksandr Lysov
Technical team
Andrey Belov, Artem Kanifatov, Maxim Lapshin, Pavel Luzhin
Accessibility and inclusion curators
Aleksandra Kharchenko, Vlad Kolesnikov, Victoria Kuzmina, Varya Merenkova, Vera Zamyslova
Art logistics and registration
Daria Krivtsova, Daria Maksimova
Graphic design
Kirill Gorbunov
Editors
Daniil Dugaev, Alexandra Kirillova
Media specialist
Anastasia Melnikova-Belinskaya
Proofreaders
Elena Karshina, Daria Savinykh
Texts in English
Ben Hooson
The exhibited works were created as part of the ColLab and Friends of the Vaults programmes at the Vaults Centre for Artistic Production
Special thanks to Katerina Zueva, producer of the ColLab programme (2022)
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