11/24: Michael Rozanov - FLYOVER

Mikhail Rozanov (1973) was born in Moscow and studied at Moscow State University. He is a photographer of the 90's generation, and began exhibiting at the age of 21. Apart from photography he shoots video clips.

Individual Exhibitions:

1994 Mikhail Rozanov. Post-industrial Romanticism. Municipal Photographic Centre, Hamburg.

1995 Landscapes. Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg.

1997 Mikhail Rozanov. Inscriptions. Aidan Gallery, Moscow. Mikhail Rozanov. Flowers. Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg

1999 Bridges. Aidan Gallery, Moscow; The Embankment. Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg

2000 Steps. Aidan Gallery, Moscow. Balustrades Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg

Main Joint Exhibitions

1995 Mikhail Rozanov. Photographs. Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg New Russian Photography. Erfurt, Berlin

1996 The Classical Trend in Modern Russian Photography (a touring exhibition in Germany) 1997 New Russian Classicism. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

1998 Neo-academic Photographs from the Collection in the Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg in the Latvian Museum of Foreign Arts, Riga

1999 Russian Seasons, Bayer, Leverkusen, Germany Suggestions for the Venetian Biennale, MMFKhI, New Manezh, Moscow

2000 The Silver Camera, State Exhibition Hall, Manezh, Moscow Treasury of Photographs from the collection in the Museum of the New Fine Arts Academy, St. Petersburg, Sinebruhov, Helsinki

Collections:

Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg

Museum of Modern Russian Photographs, Moscow

Museum of the New Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

Collection of Modern Art, Tsaritsyno, Moscow

Menatep Collection

Montazhspetsbank Collection

Goldman Sachs Collection

"Minimalism or minimal art, or ABC art began about 40 years ago in New York as a trend in music and representative art characterised by a formal conciseness and total objectivity, and it was the most popular style in fashion, design and photography in Moscow in the late 90's. The forerunners of minimalism were the artist Kasimir Malevich, a follower of Suprematism who in 1913 drew a black square on a white background, and the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, whose motto was Less is more. Among the classicists of minimalism were the sculptors Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, the painters Elsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, and the composers Morton Feldman and John Cage. There is a widely-held opinion that minimalism is the minimum use of graphic resources. At the same time, apologists of minimal art have endeavoured to reduce art itself to a minimum. This brings us pauses instead of music, light instead of colours, mass production instead of craftwork, the numerical instead of the lyrical… Mikhail Rozanov is the complete minimalist, in Russian - a Menshevik. His pictures not only have few images but also little art. Instead of the art of architecture he prefers to photograph engineering structures which are very limited in terms of conventional beauty: embankments, bridges and viaducts. The typical minimalist work denies the viewer any emotions outside the work itself, but Rozanov's photographic pauses, with an impulse that is unusual for minimalism, force one to recall Moscow's architectural elegance, against the background of which they arise. (Yu. Avvakumov)