Temporary Exhibitions
The exhibition project Untitled by artist Kostya Benkovich represents a direct dialogue with the masterpieces of universal art. The exhibition consists of installations that transform the canonical images of Leonardo da Vinci, Edvard Munch, Kazimir Malevich, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists. Extracted from their usual context, visual symbols acquire new meanings, becoming an honest discussion about today’s reality.
The exhibition is based on the deconstruction and reinterpretation of the most recognized and cited works in art history. At its center are new visual experiments with two main pillars of world culture — Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, rightly considered the most recognizable images in art. Alongside these, the exhibition includes a series of fifteen new installations that transform the visual canons of Leonardo da Vinci, Edvard Munch, Kazimir Malevich, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists, translating them into the language of current narratives and an honest dialogue about the present.
Kostya Benkovich works at the intersection of sculpture, conceptual street art and digital graphics. His artistic method is based on reducing the distance between recognized masterpieces of the past and a personal, deeply emotional statement. The exhibition consists entirely of installations in which emblematic symbols are extracted from their everyday context. By altering the original meaning of images from mass culture, Benkovich takes the viewer out of their usual perception and encourages them to reflect on the limits of personal freedom, the pressure of external laws and the contradictions of contemporary society.
An important stage in the institutional recognition of the author was the inclusion of his work The Scream (previously created as a street art intervention on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow) in the fundamental scholarly publication Edvard Munch: The Scream. This book, prepared by Professor Patricia G. Berman — one of the world’s leading researchers of Munch’s work — was published by the Munch Museum in Oslo (MUNCH). In its pages, the study of Kostya Benkovich’s method is placed alongside classics of universal art such as Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol and Marina Abramović, highlighting the importance of his artistic experiments in the context of global artistic culture.
Within the unified space of the exhibition, new interpretations of classical subjects intertwine with the author’s conceptual series, in which the reinterpretation of national symbols and the American flag conveys the loss of faith in universal democratic ideals and the limitation of contemporary space. The theme of digital reality and new forms of presence is revealed through the reflective surfaces of the “Black Avatars”, which capture the viewer’s reflection, drawing them into the work and recalling the silent acts of solidarity on social networks. Pages of books covered with black rectangles become documents of their time, in which the hidden text asserts its presence through absence and omission more powerfully than words, while spatial objects in the form of clocks record the personal experience of emigration, transforming the years that have passed into rigorous markers of existence in an era of global change.
Kostya Benkovich’s work has received broad recognition from experts and specialized institutions. His street art projects and public actions regularly go viral, accumulating millions of views both on social networks and in the press. The artist is the winner of the prestigious British Kensington + Chelsea Art Week (KCAW) competition; his works have been exhibited in Holland Park and at Saatchi Gallery in London, as well as at a major European contemporary art festival, Watou Arts Festival in Belgium. Benkovich’s large-scale installation, Suitcase, created with the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and presented for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, was named “Photo of the Day” by the British publication The Guardian. Subsequently, this work was officially included in the Edinburgh Fine Art Collection — the largest public collection in Scotland.
The presentation of the Untitled project in Chișinău will mark its international premiere, affirming the importance of conceptual art as an instrument capable of capturing the pulse of our time and conveying the meanings of the present day.
