FUTURO Gallery presents Dani Pirogov's solo project "Light Comes from Underground." Specifically for the exhibition, the artist will completely transform the gallery space, creating a new large-scale installation and a series of 10 studio works on plywood.

The artist will alter the exhibition's traditional logic, reorganizing the viewer's movement and engaging them in a play with space: swapping the display podiums and viewing areas. A key element in this process will be a man-made cave-like shell made of tracing paper, conceived as a portal to a real cave in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

The project's theme is connected to the exploration of underground spaces and the states that arise during immersion in the unknown and inexplicable. The artist works with chthonic imagery, balancing between recognizable forms and abstraction. By encountering them, the viewer undergoes an immersive experience—an encounter with darkness and one's own shadow—and only then discovers the light that emerges in the artist's works as a result of this movement.

While plywood was used in previous projects to create three-dimensional sculptures and large-scale installations, in the new exhibition, the material becomes a surface for graphic images applied with brushes, acrylic markers, and metal brushes. The artist's scratching technique emphasizes the layering and alludes to the structure of the earth, which in the "Earth-Born" series is inhabited by non-human, subterranean creatures, and in the "Revelations" series, by the silhouettes of birds, one of the key and recurring images in the artist's practice.

The artist's interest in the theme of underground spaces emerged in 2023 during a residency with the FUTURO gallery, while exploring caves and karst sinkholes in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The artist continues to work with this territory—many studio projects, including the current one, contain references to this area. The project is a logical continuation of Pirogov's artistic practice: in his previous solo project, "Wild Underground" (Triumph Gallery, 2025), the artist addressed the theme of primordial chaos and the elemental power of the earth. In the installation "Undermining" (exhibition "Undark Ages: Stories about the Middle Ages and Academicism" at the GES-2 Community Center, 2025-2026), monsters from bestiaries "break through" the wall of the exhibition space.
The exhibition "Light Comes from Underground" maintains the tension between the ordered gallery space and the chaotic, alien black structures. However, here Pirogov's subjects lose their visual aggression and dynamism, and the darkness becomes a route to an inexplicable, barely penetrating light.