Millennial artist Alexandra Gart has opened a solo exhibition at the FUTURO Gallery in Nizhny Novgorod. ‘One day the sadness will end’ is an enigmatic reflection on underlying fears and the enduring instability of our world.

St. Petersburg born artist Alexandra Gart (b. 1988) is probably best known as a graphic artist who works in a wide variety of different printing techniques, including in the field of book illustration where she has also made booklets for Teodor Currentzis’ (b. 1972) orchestra musicAeterna. While studying at the Herzen Pedagogical University where she graduated in 2015, Gart created graphic works based on works by Russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms. In 2016, she illustrated a complete collection of poetry by Nikolai Oleynikov for the St. Petersburg based publishing house Vita Nova. Yet over the past few years, Gart's artistic practice has scaled up to include site specific installations. Her deep interest in text and the word still remains a feature - at Cosmoscow in 2024, where Gart was voted Artist of the Year, her merry-go-round of horses made from dough was called ‘The Contancy of Fun and Dirt’ after Kharms´ poem.

Gart explains: “I don't start with text. Mostly when I am in the process of working I will suddenly remember a line, or the text will come to me by chance and falls into place, literally a coincidence of the pieces of a puzzle, like a jigsaw falling into place. It can be text from a song I listen to a lot or a fragment from a literary work, it doesn't matter.” Indeed, ´Jigsaw Falling Into Place´ is the name of a song by Radiohead and its lyrics are embroidered on one of the works currently on display in the exhibition at the Futuro gallery. This integration of text into her artwork or a straightforward borrowing of the titles of works by other artists or writers provokes unexpected and sometimes paradoxical semantic connections – a dialogue of allusions that would be difficult to express using only visual means. “There is an element of chance, which is always important to me, and an element of co-authorship, that is, a certain transfer of responsibility. Literature, if we call any text literature, adds additional layers, cultural, emotional, whatever, and I like it when there is this layering,” says the artist. Her visual conundrums are multi-layered, confusing, unresolvable. Gart, as a rule, does not offer unambiguous interpretations of her works.

The title of the exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, ‘One day the sadness will end’ is a line uttered by Log Lady, a character from the cult TV series ‘Twin Peaks’ by David Lynch. Instead of a bespoke curatorial text, she has used a fragment from a 2021 book ´Antiravinagar´ by St. Petersburg mathematician and film director Roman Mikhailov (b. 1978). His treatise on memory, thinking and rituals is very much in tune with the mood of Gart's graphic and pictorial work, and especially her installations. Wastelands, dead ends, fog-shrouded crossroads, imaginary forests, invariably inhabited by spirits, and other dreamlike and liminal spaces permeated with metallic mesh and unknown threats are the portals to which Gart, like Lynch and Mikhailov leads the solitary observer to overcome the inertia of his or her all too human gaze.

“The spaces I depict might be in St. Petersburg, but rather the outskirts of this city, and of course they are similar in all Eastern European cities. I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshes, among apartment blocks, wastelands and railway tracks. In the summer I went to my grandmother in Ukraine. There were steppes, barracks, barns, mines, coal. The metal structures, railway ties and half abandoned playgrounds are from there,” says the artist. By depicting abandoned urban landscapes, Gart evokes an emotional response whether one of anxious anticipation, total indifference or curiosity about dark, unstable urbanised matter.

In 2020 together with art critic and curator Alexandra Generalova (b. 1991) and artist Evgeny Kuzmichev (b. 1993), Gart organised the independent exhibition space STYD (Shame). Gart already had staged some exhibitions where interaction with the space itself played an important role, such as her projects in Navicula Artis gallery, an artist-run space FFTN and the Non-State Non-Russian Museum all independent art spaces in St. Petersburg. However, her own exhibition space allowed her to experiment more freely with total installations and immersive environments in projects Failure (2020) and Resistance is Futile (2021). Last year Gart showed her darkest and most immersive total installation yet, called ‘tutu’ at PERMM Museum in the Urals city of Perm.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Futuro gallery is a slightly rusty and instable metal structure which resembles in part ‘Red Carriage’ a 2008 installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a constructivist staircase crumbling down and bending under its own weight and a children’s slide, which stops high above the ground and promises a painful landing. Structures associated with town festivals, bazaars, fairs and playgrounds are all constants in Gart’s art. In addition to this rather scary, large slide, there is the ‘Cosmoscow’ merry-go-round and a sharp, rusty swing called ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ (2022) resembling an instrument of torture and shown at the ‘Kurort’ festival in St. Petersburg’s Komarovo suburb. All the deliberate joy of these amusement devices is inverted by the artist and reduced to monotonous repetition, decay, a futile effort to keep balance and overcome pain. In these neo-infantilist images there is no fairy tale, no escapism, no longing for the old days, nor, as Gart admits, any reflection on her son's experience of growing up.

However, the artist does not deny the influence of ten-year-old Gart Jr, who, it turns out will open his own solo exhibition in St Petersburg’s Marina space at the end of February and who she finds a supportive force of nature in her own creative work. Her son even gives her advice as well as becoming involved in her creative process, so she feels it is fair to talk about the mutual appropriation of artistic languages. “Sometimes he draws from me, sometimes I draw from him,” says the artist. Gart Jr. was also involved in the preparation for the exhibition at Futuro Gallery: he did a little embroidery on one of the works on display.

Textiles are the most uncharted medium in Gart’s artistic practice, but they are absolutely organic to her. The artist has already presented embroidery-covered nets at Anna Nova Gallery in her solo exhibition ‘Spider's Web Forest’ (2021) and cross-stitched poker charts at the State Nikolai Nekrasov Museum. “But, of course, it was the first time I worked on such a big scale,” says Gart, “I made the largest fabric piece for my current show at home and saw only fragments while I was working on it. I love such accidents, and I'm thinking of making an even bigger fabric piece in future.” Motifs of incomplete vision and elusiveness are important to her: the vastness of the embroidery, as well as the mysterious forests and ruins she depicts, suggest the inscrutability and fragmentation of the world. Despite the obvious graphic nature of Gart’s monochrome embroidery, whose stitches are so similar to strokes, the artist notes the peculiarities of working with textiles: “There is a kind of plasticity in embroidery, it is a much slower, meditative activity than drawing or painting. When you want to make a black spot, you have to sit with it for three or four hours and it feels very strange!”. It seems that the temporality of embroidery and sadness correlate with each other: one day the sadness will end, but for now you must live it stitch by stitch.