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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Exhibitions >> Leningrad 80s >>
E-E Kozlov – Oleg Kotelnikov – Nikolai VeinertLENING-ACCEE–RAD
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Page 1: Introduction |
Page 2: E-E Kozlov‘s paintings |
Page 3: E-E- Kozlov and Oleg Kotelnikov: The creation of LENING-ACCEE–RAD |
Page 4: Documentation |
Introduction In the 1970s, Leningrad University started to relocate the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences to Petrodvorets, as Peterhof was calld during the Soviet times – more exactly, to the western part of the city called "Old Peterhof".
The "Peterhof Educational and Scientific Complex" or "PUNK" (ПУНК, Петродворцовый учебно-научный комплекс, Petrodvortsovyi uchebno-nauchnyi kompleks) consists of a number of institute buildings, residence halls for students and a students' club. The latter, a modernist landmark from 1984 better known as "puck" (шайба, shaiba) – because of its circular shape – is today called the "Palace of Culture and Science” of Saint Petersburg University. The building, however, appears to be circular only from the front side; on the other side, like feathers attached to the base of a shuttlecock, a large protruding structure houses a theatre and concert hall with six hundred seats. Seen from above, the shape of the building resembles that of a comet with a tail. This "tail", originally intended to serve as the building's main entrance, became its back side due to difficulties of connecting it to the surrounding streets. The university club managed a cultural programme which included the screening of movies that wouldn't be shown in regular movie theatres. Kozlov, who knew the people in charge of students' club, occiasionaly attended those movies, as he was living nearby, in New Peterhof. On one of these occasions, he was asked to set up an exhibition of his works, and he decided to invite Oleg Kotelnikov and Nikolai Veinert to join him for the exhibition. Other than Kotelnikov and Kozlov, Veinert was not a member of the New Artists group, but belonged to Kozlov's Peterhof group of friends.
Located on the second floor, the foyer of the theatre hall, a spacious curved hall with daylight coming in through a bank of panorama windows, was also used for exhibitions and and other events; it was there that the exhibition of the three artists took place.
As a rule, Kozlov‘s documented his own exhibitions with his camera, and he did so in this case, although the documentation is not very extenisve. In his archive are two film strips from two different black and white 35 mm negative films I registered as BR (seven pictures) and EX (six pictures). From those thirteen pictures – the majority of them taken by Nikolai Veinert – I selected ten for this presentation. The shooting starts with the EX film strip, and the pictures actually document what happened prior to the exhibition: we see Kozlov and Kotelnikov creating a huge painting on some kind of material spread on the floor. BR shows this joint work after completion as well as the hanging of Kozlov's works and some other views of his works. As Kozlov wanted to record the creation of his joint work with Kotelnikov, the majority of pictures was taken by Nikolai Veinert. None of the pictures display any of Kotelnikov's or Veinert's paintings – nor is there any documentation of the exhibition itself. Unfortunately, the photographs are out of focus. Perhaps Kozlov used films with low sensitivy which, to avoid long exposure, requires either a tripod or a powerful flash, none of which was availabe. Alternatively, the lens can be set at maximum aperture, which limits the depth of field and makes object blur. This might have been the case here. Be that as it may, we cannot determine smaller details in the picutres. But fortunately, these images still allow us identify a number of Kozlov's works and, most importantly, to describe some of the main features of the process of painting the joint work.
Text and research: Hannelore Fobo, October 2020
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