pop/off/art gallery presents an exhibition of classic of contemporary Russian art and one of the representatives of the artists of 60s Nikolai Kasatkin “At the end. To the 90th anniversary of the artist”.

The project will feature works from the 2010s – an important period when the master seeks to use the artistic language developed over many years to express his attitude to the world, understanding his place in it. The core of the exhibition will be the works created by the artist in the very last years of his life: “Near the House”, “Autumn Evening”, “Beginning”. Each work creates the effect of immersing the viewer in the space of the picture, becomes a continuation of the real world. The Moscow audience will see these works for the first time: they have not been exhibited in the city before.

The exhibition will also include the landmark work «Two spaces» painted in 2015. It was shown at a retrospective exhibition in the New Manege, after which it was rewritten by Kasatkin in 2016. In his autobiography, the artist notes his ability for many years to maintain the sharpness of the experience of what he saw, to «nurture» the idea. As a rule, such inner work left no traces. It is for the painting «Two spaces» that there are several compositional sketches made in different years. They will also become part of the exhibition and allow the viewer to follow the movement of the artist's thought.

Separately, the Russian question series of 1992, made in the collage technique from prints of the author's linocut of 1968, will be shown. This work was chosen from the master's large and varied graphic heritage: it quite radically expresses Kasatkin's value and worldview, which determines the importance of the theme of the Russian landscape.

Nikolay Kasatkin is a classic of contemporary Russian art, one of the iconic representatives of the 60s generation. The subject of the artist's research is the picture, which the author considers both as a visual image and as an intellectual construction. His art is deeply connected with unofficial soviet artists, first of all with Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev. His creative search expressed in post-Sezannist experiments (under the influence of R. Falk), then (since second part of 60’s) – in combining a painting and an object.

In his works Kasatkin studied an influence of photography and kitch culture on painting. Though a «conceptual landscape», which was based on the principle of combining recognizable landscape structures both in nature and in the history of art, has become his most important theme since the beginning of 1970’s. Kasatkin worked with the space of the image, the objective principles of its construction, considering the achievements of both avant-garde art and realistic painting. Therefore, he developed his own, recognizable and unique style in art.

Nikolai Kasatkin was born in 1932 in the village of Zhukovo, Smolensk region, since 1933 he lived in Moscow, however, since 1983, he spent every summer in the Smolensk region, in the village of Vorontsovo. In 1959 he from Moscow State Art Institute n. a. V.I. Surikov, since 1973 – a member of the Moscow Union of Artists. Kasatkin was a participant in many personal and group projects. The artist's works are in the collections of the Sepherot Foundation (Liechtenstein), Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (USA), the State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin (Moscow), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), the Sfera Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art (Moscow), in a number of collections of regional Russian museums and private collections. The artist died on October 26, 2019 in Moscow.

pop/off/art gallery was founded by the art historian and curator Sergey Popov in 2004 and represents Russian and international artists, focusing on those from the post-Soviet space and from Eastern and Central Europe. The gallery is in the Top-5 Russian galleries (Forbes) and in “The Best 500 Galleries Worldwide” (Blouin ARTINFO). It participates in the largest contemporary Art Fairs in Europe. Along with its commercial activities, the main priority for the Gallery is its active exhibition policy. pop/off/art gallery has organized several dozens of museum projects in Russia. Located at the Center for Contemporary Art "Winzavod", Moscow.