Landscape

(Photo: The British Council )

"Landscape", a traveling "exhibition of the younger generation of British artists" brought by the British Council, is part of the non-profit program of the International Contemporary Art Fair "Art Moscow", opening on May 16. The British simply did not wait for the general opening day, and rightly so - the atmosphere of a noisy marketplace contradicts the measured art of Foggy Albion being shown.

Already from the title it is clear that “Landscape” is a kind of response of official English curators (the British Council, after all!) to another traveling exhibition, also composed of young talents - to the notorious “Sensation”, advertising radicals from the Saatchi collection. The state is trying to save the image of national art, spoiled by a possessed patron of the arts, and is offering modern and high-quality, but harmless exercises on the most traditional and very English theme - landscape. English, because classical English art of the 19th century, one way or another rejected by modern artists, is primarily the landscapes of Joseph Mallord Turner and John Constable.

The most striking (in the literal sense of the word) work of the exhibition, belonging to a London artist who came up with the strange pseudonym “Bob and Roberta Smith” (in fact, he is Patrick Brill), is dedicated to the love-hate relationship with luxurious ancestors. In multi-colored letters on a white background there is a declaration of love for Turner, but with a spelling error that turns his name Mallord into the name of a breed of duck. You can appreciate the harmlessness and even touchingness of this joke if you look - in contrast - at the work of Matt Collishaw, one of the participants in "Sensation". For example, in the series of light boxes with collages “Flowers with Infection,” the petals of luxurious lilies turn out to be photographs of terrible festering cancerous tumors (pictured). It remains to be noted that Saatchi has done his dirty deed, and the British Council, taking into account the worldwide fame of his artists, is forced to infect the English landscape with such emetic “flowers of evil”.