A solo exhibition ‘Pavel Pepperstein. Before and After’ at Iragui Gallery in Paris offers a rare opportunity to trace over four decades of Pavel Pepperstein’s ‘The Magic Mountain’, Pepperstein builds an intricate dialogue between literature, mysticism, and contemporary history, blending narrative, image, and irony into a single artistic cosmos.

The full title of the solo exhibition, Pavel Pepperstein. Before and After the Magic Mountain, invites viewers to reflect on the breadth of Pavel Pepperstein’s (b. 1966) creative journey. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain has been a profound source of inspiration for the artist – so much so that his pseudonym itself derives from one of the novel’s characters, Pieter Peeperkorn. Pepperstein recalls admiring this novel since his teenage years, carrying it as a constant companion throughout his career. One is left to wonder: was there ever truly a “before” to this enduring influence?

Curated by British art historian and writer Alistair Hicks, the exhibition at Iragui Gallery’s Paris branch spans more than four decades of Pavel Pepperstein’s career. It gathers his works on paper from 1979 to 2021, presenting them to a French audience for the first time in many years. Remarkably, this marks his first solo gallery exhibition in over a decade. Notably, in 2012, thirty-two of his drawings from the 2000s were acquired by the Centre Pompidou, thanks to a donation from Florence and Daniel Guerlain.

The exhibition features a rare graphic series from 1979 that represents Pepperstein’s “pre–Magic Mountain” period. Entitled ‘The Adventures of Joseph Katsenelson’, it introduces a character entirely of the artist’s own invention. Pepperstein has noted that he created these fourteen drawings before encountering Mann’s novel or developing a conscious interest in Jewish traditions. Yet, as he observes, the seeds of these later fascinations are already present – albeit “on a dreamy, imaginative level” – in the motifs of the series, from Jacob’s Ladder to crumbling ruins and mountain valleys.

In a 2016 interview, he explained: “I made a series related to Judaism and Jewish mysticism, to the Kabbalah. You could say that all of Moscow Сonceptualism, to which I belong, arose at the intersection of various echoes of the Jewish experience. After all, commentary and interpretation of texts have always been at the epicentre of Jewish religious practice.” Now Pepperstein's provocative nature brings Jewish identity and traditions to the fore at a time when many would prefer to avoid the spotlight. However, his provocativeness in recent years has also been quite selective.

Moving further into the exhibition space we encounter a book collection reminding us that Pepperstein is also a celebrated writer, poet and theorist. The selection includes a French edition of ‘A Prague Night’. His passion for books was fostered during his childhood years in Peredelkino, a legendary writers’ village on the outskirts of Moscow. Both of Pepperstein’s parents created book illustrations, his father, Viktor Pivovarov (b. 1937), one of the founding figures of Moscow Conceptualism, studied at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute and continued to illustrate books even after moving from the USSR to the Czech Republic. His mother, Natalia Pivovarova (1939–1986), was a children’s writer, poet and book illustrator. She also wrote scripts for animation films. Since he was a young child, Pepperstein was immersed in a literary and artistic environment.

The illustrated magazine and book covers of Pepperstein’s literary works from the 1980s clearly show how visual and textual elements are integral to his artistic imagination and personality. In an interview, he admitted to being fascinated by the concept of narrative itself. “Even where there is none, it can arise. The narrative potential of existence always inspires me a lot”, he said. Indeed, Pepperstein’s works, which are based on his broad outlook and curiosity, resemble one big illustrated meta-novel. In a room without temporal or geographical borders, all of these narratives create a kind of white noise. Pepperstein has recently become fascinated by the physical phenomenon whereby different sound elements balance each other out to form a harmony within a frequency field.

For curator Alistair Hicks, this exhibition marks his second consecutive exploration of mysticism, following his recent project with ‘The Agency of Singular Investigations’. Whereas ASI drew its inspiration from Kafka, Pepperstein has long declared his lifelong admiration for Thomas Mann. One might regret that some of Pepperstein’s works – both individual and collaborative – exploring the theme of bureaucracy were not included here, as their presence would have created a fascinating dialogue between the two exhibitions.

A documentary photographic series by Bruno Mancia and Franziska Bodmer, created in 1992 for an exhibition of the now-defunct art group ‘Inspection Medical Hermeneutics’ – of which Pepperstein was a founding member – transports viewers to the artist’s own vision of the Berghof sanatorium, a place where time seems to stand still. Together with fellow members Vladimir Fedorov (1963–2018) and Sergey Anufriev (b. 1964), Pepperstein explored the depths of the subconscious in Davos, near the very settings that inspired Mann’s novel. The group would gather for extended discussions on aesthetic, social, and political issues, reflecting on the historical and economic turmoil that followed the collapse of the USSR.

The question of what might follow ‘The Magic Mountain’ remains unresolved – and perhaps deliberately so. The absence of works from the past four years could itself be a silent answer. Among the most recent pieces included in the show is a 2020 drawing depicting a mythical creature with a bloodstained red beard, a protruding blue tongue, and a hat. Beneath it, Pepperstein has inscribed the caption ‘The Horror and the Absurd’ in his characteristic ink hand. The artist’s scepticism toward the future has long been evident, most strikingly in his graphic series of fantastical, almost surreal landscapes of distant epochs, where rigid Suprematist forms emerge through misty contours. This visionary project, titled ‘Victory over the Future’, was first presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Capturing the sphere of subconscious, Pepperstein's surreal and ironic brightly-coloured works on paper eloquently reveal the surrounding environment, in many ways anticipating the upcoming shifts and crises. However, while revealing these hidden and sometimes frightening corners of human consciousness, Pepperstein does not lose his childlike qualities, irony and freely floating thought. The exhibition quotes directly from his book ‘The Velvet Kibitka’: “In childhood I fully felt the significance of the child’s cosmos, its sheer grandeur”.