Vladimir Kartashov UNILOVEBANK 2024 Oil on canvas 150×170cm Courtesy of Tg residency

On Tuesday, 17 September 2024, the artist Vladimir Kartashov (born in Novosibirsk in 1997) presents Spellbound, his 8th personal exhibition, in the space of the Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani.

Influenced by a variety of iconographic traditions, mythologies, and oneiric dimensions, the Russian artist sets out to explore the increasingly challenging evolution of the human condition in the digital era. His works, expressions of an incredibly poetic imagination and a vivid aesthetic sensitivity, position themselves at the junction of various visual traditions spanning from realism to symbolism and from surrealism to existentialism.

Kartashov's signature sophisticated style is nurtured by multiple material and symbolic layers, which he employs to explore the universal themes of life and death, time and spirituality while probing into individual emotional realms and their relation to the inaccessible areas of the human psyche. His paintings at the intersection of the fantastic and the realistic oscillate between introspection and wonder.

The show at the Prometeo Gallery features large-scale canvases depicting lavish scenes populated by animals and fantastic creatures with concealed faces; vegetal elements provide spectacular backdrops brimming with symbols, emoticons, peculiar hyper realistic objects, and written codes; the resulting image is abundant to the point of overflowing.

The young artist's paintings are lively and material, his brushstrokes alternating between gentle touches and thick layers—a technique that endows his canvases with depth and tactility at the same time, emphasising their physical presence and conferring a nearly sculptural dimension to the images.... read the rest of the article»

According to the curator Domenico de Chirico, the resulting body of work is "a series of powerful and enigmatic visions engendering new pictorial heterotopies along the lines of the Foucauldian counter-sites, the non-spaces that provide societies with critical mirrors perceived as deviation scenarios, patterns of contestation or inversion of social and cultural conventions. There, the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the grotesque, the heavenly and the infernal, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or in essence the good and the evil coexist in perfect eurhythmy".

In Spellbound, Vladimir Kartashov transports the viewer into alternative, highly symbolic imaginary worlds, taking us on a visual and emotional journey of discovery into the deepest abysses of human experience.

The exhibition is created in collaboration with Tg residency established in Pietrasanta in 2022 with the aim to promote contemporary artists and enable artistic production based on the unique resources of the local marble quarries, bronze foundries, ceramic kilns, and spacious studios. Tg residency organises solo and group shows across the world, working together with galleries and high-profile art institutions.
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Prometeo Gallery is an initiative of Ida Pisani. Since 2005, it has evolved from an experience cultural association into a gallery based in Milan and Lucca, instantly assuming the role of a catalyst for the social and political dreams and ambitions of a wide range of artists working in various mediums. The space launched in 2005 with Perra, a project by the Guatemalan Regina José Galindo, who went on to win the Golden Lion Award for young artists at the Venice Biennial of the same year. The same prize had been awarded in 2001 to Anìbal Lòpez, another Guatemalan artist whose collaboration with the gallery was interrupted by his untimely death in 2014, at the age of 50. In 2007, Prometeo hosted Trabajos italianos, the first Italian exhibition by the Spanish performance and installation artist Santiago Serra which included Los Anarquistas, a show originally developed for the Fondazione Volume! in Rome. Over the years, several artists represented by the gallery featured in the Venice Biennial, notably Ivan Moudov, Giuseppe Stampone, Regina José Galindo, Mary Zygouri, Stefano Tsivoupoulos, and Hiwa K. Some of the highlights of the gallery's programme since 2017 include Mea culpa, a personal show by Santiago Serra in the Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea in Milan (the venue also hosted a show by Regina José Galindo in 2014 and a show by Zehra Doğan in 2021), and the participation of four Prometeo artists in the 14th edition of Documenta (Stefano Tsivopoulos, Regina José Galindo, Mary Zygouri, and Hiwa K). Since then, the Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K was invited to create a show at the New Museum in New York, and in 2021 Galindo's video Tierra (2013) became part of the permanent collection of MoMA as the third work of the artist acquired by the museum. The same year, Galindo received the Robert Rauschenberg Award. Since 2019, Prometeo is representing Zehra Doğan a Kurdish artist from Turkey featured among ArtReview's Power 100 in 2020 and 2021.