AES+F | Inverso Mundus: Chimeras

April 25 – June 1, 2024

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition Inverso Mundus: Chimeras, the debut New York exhibition of internationally acclaimed Russian artist collective AES+F.  Inverso Mundus: Chimeras, will present a series of never before seen paintings, correlated to images and themes from Inverso Mundus, their video installation and performance work that premiered at the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015.  This marks the first presentation of the group’s work to feature exclusively paintings. Produced in the style of the Old Masters, these works present the groundbreaking and challenging work of AES+F in a new medium for a new audience. 

AES+F works in photography, video production, sculpture, and painting with the goal of creating large-scale narratives that explore our contemporary global landscape and its culture, vices, and values.  First founded in the former Soviet Union in 1987, they have shown at major institutions across Europe, Asia, and the United States.  Their painting practice, produced collectively in the group’s Berlin studio, employs hyper-realistic oil painting techniques to mimic the digital glossiness of their video and digital work, tethering their complex renderings to the two-dimensional and the handmade.

Inverso Mundus takes as its initial reference point the sixteenth-century Carnivalesque engravings in the genre of “world upside down,” an early form of populist social critique that emerged with the advent of the Gutenberg press. This body of work presents contemporary life turned “upside down,” depicting a tragi-comic apocalypse where social conventions are inverted to highlight the unspoken premises of our social contract.  In the Chimeras series, various archetypes of contemporary life are portrayed cradling uncanny monsters on their laps like cherished pets. The series asks viewers to confront the monstrous contradictions we all hold dear in contemporary society.

In the wake of Putin’s re-election, the violence against dissidents such as Aleksei Navalny, and the recent amplified persecution of artists across Russia, AES+F’s critiques of the oligarchy, power, and military aggression are particularly pointed. Their public stance against the war in Ukraine has made them a target, and informed their decision to leave Moscow and relocate to Berlin in 2022.  This exhibition brings AES+F’s groundbreaking and urgent work to New York, adding new context to the international conversation.

AES Group was first formed in 1987 in the former Soviet Union by Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky. The art collective became AES+F in 1995 with the addition of Vladimir Fridkes. The collective works in photography, video, sculpture, and painting, creating large-scale narratives that explore our contemporary global landscape and its culture, vices, and values. 

AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.

Globally recognized and extensively lauded as masters of their craft, AES+F have been showcased in a myriad of festivals, museums, exhibitions, and collections, including the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, and the Gwangju Biennale, among others. They were also featured in the Lille3000 Festival in 2009, and now have a permanent installation at the Gare Saint-Sauveur in Lille (France). AES+F has been featured in exhibitions as well as permanent collections at locations such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Tate Britain (London, England), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), Taguchi Art collection (Tokyo, Japan), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah,GA),Gwangju Museum of Art (Gwangju, South Korea), Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris, France), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, Spain), Today Art Museum (Beijing, China), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, Australia), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires, Argentia) among other major international institutions. AES+F has also appeared in many popular publications, including Artforum, The New York Times, The Guardian, Wallpaper, KUNSTFORUM International, Frieze, Flash Art, Le Monde, Art Press, Corriere della Sera, and many others. The group’s newest monograph was published by Rizzoli in 2023 and catalogs the last twenty-five years of their work.

The group now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. In April 2022, they released a statement to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, declaring, “We cannot represent a country that is undertaking a genocidal war of aggression, brainwashing its own population, and repressing and terrorizing its citizens for protesting even with blank placards.” The group also canceled upcoming exhibitions in Russia and refused to work on any projects in Russia until Putin’s government is no longer in power. 

Press

FRIEZE | January 2017

Ocula | November 2013

The New York Times | December 2005

ARTnews | April 2005

Artforum | April 2005

Publication

AES+F | Published by Rizzoli