Gallery Triangle is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Saint-Petersburg-based artist Alexey Bogolepov (b. 1985 in Vyborg).

The show consists of large-format photographs and sculptures that reflect personal explorations of objects and forms encountered in the post-Soviet space. Bogolepov is drawn to a morphological approach, developed by structuralist thinkers D'Arcy Thompson and René Thom. However, in this case it is applied to a complex of architectural and institutional arrangements, known as "Soviet modernism". Modernist design of the XXth century is customarily credited with liberating the artist from reproduction of representational canons. In the case of later decades of the USSR this connection is less straightforward – a Soviet modernist's activities occur in a field of free form that is contained within a closed system. The resulting pressure gave birth to a wide range of strange creations in all spheres, where planning approach was used – from architecture and applied arts to the governmental system and political processes. Bogolepov traces these patterns to the prevalence of central planning practices and systemic vision in contemporary Russian politics. Bogolepov constantly alters the order and proportions of different components of his artistic method – architectural photography, construction, structural analysis, documentation. Sometimes a work gets pulled through cycles of propaedeutic inspection along the lines of Josef Albers's or Nikolay Ladovsky's "study of materials" courses until it acquires a sufficient degree of abstraction and the very idea of an object gets expanded. This "speculative modernism" has no room for fervid subjectivity, yet it accepts relatively autonomous operators – and the artist is one of them. This is an invitation to see the material environment and human activity as a series of intersections, differences and voids that fall together to form polygonal grids and modular alphabets.

Selected solo exhibitions: Schusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow (2014), FotoDepartament Gallery in Saint-Petersburg (2015), ZARYA Center for Contemporary Art in Vladivostok (2016). Selected group exhibitions: Novy Museum (2016), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2015), Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography (2015), SMENA Center in Kazan (2014), parallel programs of the V Moscow International Biennale of Young Art (2016), and Manifesta 10 (2014).