Dana Ellyn at MISP
Radical Fluidity: Grotesque in Art
Dana Ellyn’s painting Baby Back Ribs (2012) hung in Radical Fluidity: Grotesque in Art, an international exhibition of about 300 works by more than 100 artists at the Museum of St. Petersburg Art (MISP) in Russia. She and Matt Sesow were the only artists from the United States.
The museum gave the painting its own wall label in Russian and English, with an audio guide stop. The exhibition catalog reproduced it full page, and the catalog essay by Alexander Borovsky names her work.
The exhibition
Curated by Afrodite Oikonomidou
The museum gave the whole building over to it: four floors of galleries plus the stairwells, the inner courtyard, and the canal embankment outside, which the organisers described as a labyrinth of the grotesque. Sergey Borodkin’s floating installation PapaWok sat in the Griboyedov Canal in front of the entrance.
The curatorial premise traced the grotesque across centuries, inviting visitors to find the inheritance of Bosch, Arcimboldo and Goya in twentieth and twenty-first century work. Painting, graphics, sculpture, installation, video, photography and collage, by artists from Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, China and elsewhere. The programme ran to master classes, performances, films and a lecture series on grotesque and satire.
MISP holds a collection representing artists of St Petersburg. It was formally established in January 2016 as a branch of the Manège Central Exhibition Hall, though the collection itself dates back to 1990.
The museum announced the show in a press release titled “International Art Project Radical Fluidity. Grotesque in Art,” shared by Matt Sesow on November 25, 2018. It listed “more than 100 artists from Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, USA, China and other countries.”
How it got there
By way of Matt Sesow
Sesow was invited to take part. He introduced the curators to Ellyn’s work, and to this painting in particular, as the right fit for the show’s theme. They agreed, and curated it in.
Neither of them travelled to St Petersburg. The painting went without them, hung in a museum on the Griboyedov Canal through February 17, 2019, and came home to Washington in spring 2019.
