Office
The exhibition «The Common Private» shows the process of socialization of a man, his self-identification and adaptation to the conditions of modern society using diverse thematic landscape: a typical school, psychiatric hospital or average office…
The series «Daily Routine» (was on display at MMOMA in 2013) shows, that every man enclosed in the narrow confines of their social role, in this case — the walls of the insane asylum, exists in a closed community, where everything operates according to the established rules. In the series «The Game of General View» (in Triumph Gallery in 2015) one can see how social institutes (nurseries, kindergartens, schools) prepare children to be fit for the matrix of adult life — through games and routine to future obligations and law abidance. The characters of the new cycle «The Office» are adapted to the system of «white collars», part of a bulky structure of a big corporation whose life is subordinated to a strict working schedule and is full of the same events and actions imitating employees’ activity.
Each series of paintings exhibited at MMOMA is accompanied by a model of an entity that is in artist’s focus. These are handmade, confined spaces — empty and impersonal. The psychiatric hospital from the project «Daily Routine» is a labyrinth of tiled floors and walls covered by the oil painting. Shocking and hypnotizing is an endless succession of standardized objects of a kindergarten in a model of «The Games of General View». A surprisingly lyric office from the series of the same name looks like a strict grid. In reality it is an aquarium, free water space on which is slowly moving a goldfish — beautiful, but wordless and without any will. These silence and emptiness permeate every part of the triptych full of clear air.
Executed in light and often cheerful tones the pictures by Maria Safronova do not cause any oppressive sense of doom, do not impose on the viewer a certain perception, but only focus the attention on how everything is arranged. There are no main or minor characters, all of them are equally significant and dressed in typical clothes: school uniform, hospital gown or office dress code. They are a kind of statists placed in the overall generalized interior. In the pictures we can easily recognize a school lesson or a business meeting in the office conference room. And this is the main idea of the exhibition at MMOMA: to show the «arithmetic mean» between the common for all the modern society and the private for each person.
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Triumph Gallery present a solo exhibition of Maria Safronova «The Common Private» featuring paintings and installations from the artist’s three series executed for the last five years. The exhibition is being held within the MMOMA Program for Support to Young Art and the Young Lions project of the Triumph Gallery.