pop / off / art gallery in collaboration with Anna Nova Gallery presents “Not Here” a solo exhibition by Andrey Kuzkin — artist, performer, actionist and sculptor, and one of the key figures of the contemporary Russian art scene. In his practice Kuzkin consistently addresses the materiality of the human body, its relationship with time and with the surrounding — or conversely, illusory — reality.
The project “Not Here” is structured around the theme of escapism as a response to the experience of instability and the pressure of physical reality. The exhibition brings together works from 2022–2024, created by the artist during his time in Europe. During this period Kuzkin returns to his earlier series "Cards" first conceived in 2009 based on the "Theory of Emotional Perception of Numbers" — the artist’s personal system of interpreting numbers as a set of signs shaped by individual emotions and associations. The series includes more than one hundred assemblage works.
Along with this the exhibition presents sculptures and reliefs made from bread crumb and earth — materials central to Kuzkin’s practice and directly connected to bodily existence, vulnerability and the transience of life. These works act as a counterpoint to the quasi-scientific “Cards series” anchoring the project in material experience. The exhibition also includes photographs documenting the performative project Phenomenon of Nature or 99 Landscapes with a Tree, in which Kuzkin tests the physical limits of his body. A central element of the exhibition is a photograph documenting a performance held in France near the town of Avallon on October 4, 2024.
The exhibition is built on an internal conflict between the desire for withdrawal into oneself and the impossibility of fully breaking away from the external world. This state of “in-betweenness” — one foot here, the other already beyond — becomes the key motif of Not Here. The works do not depict escape itself, but rather a refusal to accept a single, “objective” description of reality where its didactic force prevents alternative artistic statements from emerging.
