The exhibition
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.
Baby Back Ribs
An infant sits screaming on a grey cloth spread across a dark red tiled counter, surrounded by red and green apples. A rack of ribs is painted into its back, the bones bare. Behind, on a wall of turquoise tile, hang four gold-framed portraits of pigs, arranged like family photographs.
Painted six years before the exhibition, it belongs to the long strand of Ellyn's work about what people eat and how they avoid looking at it. Its place in a show about the grotesque was not a stretch.
How it got there
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 for ten weeks in a museum on the Griboyedov Canal, and came home.
In the catalog
The exhibition catalog reproduced the painting full page, credited in Russian and English:
Холст, акрил. 99,1×94
Acrylic on canvas. 99,1×94
Opening night
Photographs from the opening are on Matt Sesow's site.
Matt Sesow at MISP
Sesow showed four works in the same exhibition. His invitation is what brought both of them into the show, and his own page carries the full documentation — installation views, opening night, and the catalog.
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