Bond, Olga Boldyreff, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art

“Bond”. Solo exhibition by Olga Boldyreff. Olga Boldyreff was born in 1957 in Nantes (France), in a family of Russian immigrants. Her artistic practice is rather a search for identity than just a creating process. While being not quite French and not fully Russian, Boldyreff addresses to the topic of interspacial relationships. She tries to find meeting points between French and Russian cultures, as well as between her own family’s present and past.

The artist works with various materials: knitwear installations, wall drawings, prints and stitched lithographs. In Erarta she will present works from the past and some new ones, specifically prepared for the exhibition.

Exploring relationships between different art disciplines, Boldyreff refers to folk. She gives a particularly important role to the traditional European art of knitting, which she uses as a metaphor of time embodiment. Boldyreff makes performances of knitting sessions in public places: libraries, buses, City Halls, etc. Passers-by usually engage in the conversation, and even join knitting, thereby new connections get established. Thus a symbolic action turns into an immaterial result that gains strength over the time just like a spooling clew. Thread is the artist’s main creative symbol. It is a line, connecting the scattered and linking the ambivalent into a whole.

The bigger part of the exhibition will features knitted sculptures and wall installations of cords shaped as household objects, architectural forms, plants and animals. Boldyreff’s art is firstly a new type of drawing, extended in space and devoid of a usual surface. New wall paintings are created over again for each exhibition, while threads continue to fulfill their mission even after clewing up. And when travelling to a new place, they become a part of a total drawing, limitless and frameless. In Erarta Olga Boldyreff will present her new wall paintings with symbols of St. Petersburg.

The artist’s solo exhibitions took place earlier in St. Petersburg at The Dostoevsky Museum in 2013, and at The Anna Akhmatova Museum in 2010, as well as in different museums and galleries in Europe. Her works are presented in the collections of Fine Arts Museum in Calais (France), Västerås Art Museum (Sweden), Museum of Modern Art of Belfort (France), Fine Arts Museum of Angers (France), Regional Contemporary Art Fund in Pas-de-Calais (France), Regional Contemporary Art Fund in Loire (France), National Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris (France), and National Library of France.

Especially for Erarta Olga Boldyreff has created two new series of graphic works, “Don-Loire” and “Petersburg-Nantes”, two solid visual sequences of French and Russian landscapes. A series of engravings “Walking in the City” (2007) will show topographic maps of Nantes and Pad de Calais city quarters, where streets and places have Russian names.

The exhibition project “Bond” is a polyphony of voices, born in the connection of the real and the imaginary, the actual French experience of the artists and her reconstructed Russian memories.

Olga Boldyreff
Olga Boldyreff, born on September 16, 1957 in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), is a French artist. A polymorphous artist, she formed herself in contact with the Russian Avant – garde and the artists of the post Minimalism (art), the Antiform and Arte Povera.

Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art
Erarta is the biggest global project in Russian contemporary art, a must-see institution for gaining insight into modern Russia. At the heart of Erarta lies a totally unique approach to both the art and the viewer, a desire to build a new relationship system between people and art. The museum’s absolute focus and priority are concentrated on the most important person at Erarta – the visitor. All of Erarta’s activities are aimed at growing the number of people who appreciate and love contemporary art because at the core of the institution lies a belief that love of art can make any individual’s life more interesting and fulfilling, thus, ultimately, spreading a passion for art makes the world a happier place.

Erarta is Russia’s largest private museum of contemporary art, a must-see place for gaining insight into modern Russia. Its permanent collection featuring over 2,800 works by Russian artists, along with more than 40 exciting temporary exhibitions staged by the museum every year, have firmly established it on the list of things to do in St. Petersburg. Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art was repeatedly mentioned as a top choice tourist attraction by Lonely Planet guidebooks; ranks among the top 10 museums in Russia on TripAdvisor; was spotlighted as one of the ‘5 Cultural Gems’ among places to visit in St. Petersburg by National Geographic, and became the country’s first contemporary art museum to be featured on Google Arts and Culture Project.

In St. Petersburg, one of the wings of its 10,000 sq. m building is dedicated to the permanent exhibit of the collection of Erarta Museum, the largest private museum in Russia, containing 2800 works by more than 300 artists from all over the country. Another two wings are dedicated to temporary exhibitions and change completely every three months, with over 35 shows in total staged each year. There is also a multi-function Erarta Stage performance hall with a maximum occupancy of 800, which every year hosts over 300 various events such as plays, concerts and film screenings as well as lectures and meetings with renowned figures from the worlds of art, fashion and design. Erarta is open every day except for Tuesdays, from 10:00 till 22:00