On 5 November, the Samara branch of the Tretyakov Gallery will open an exhibition ‘Childhood. Dreams’. This project is an immersion into the world of Soviet children. The curators sought to recreate the space of children's fantasies and dreams, experimenting with the museum format and emphasising personal memories and emotions. The architecture, designed by Planet 9, plays a special role in the exhibition. It conveys the atmosphere of spaces that are significant for children: a toy shop, a school classroom, a house made of sofa cushions, and the courtyard of a Soviet Khrushchev-era apartment building.
The exhibition includes 63 works from the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Samara Regional Art Museum, and private collections. Among them is a sculpture by Alexandra Gart, provided by Anna Nova Gallery.
Many of the works in the exhibition reflect an ‘adult’ view of childhood: artists reflect on their own journey into adulthood and their experiences of parenthood.
Gart's ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ is a rusty seesaw with torn, time-worn horse profiles. Their image evokes complex emotions and resonates painfully in the memory. The sculpture resembles a broken execution mechanism, hinting at the impossibility of maintaining a balance between entertainment and destruction.
‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ was created as a site-specific object for the Resort festival, held in Komarovo in the summer of 2022. The second place where the work was shown was the courtyard of the Museum of Moscow. Anna Nova Gallery presented it at the Blazar'22 fair.
