Boris Kocheishvili’s works are a kind of formula — capturing the essence of the human figure and its surrounding space, the rhythms, the pulsation of color and form within a schematically rendered landscape. Polina Lobachevskaya, the project’s curator, grasped a key theme of the motif of the shore, which runs like a red thread through the artist’s entire body of work. She strung her exhibition decisions onto this thread like beads, carefully shaping the presentation of Kocheishvili’s works. The sound, movement, and light introduced into the exhibition space by other artists in no way diminished the significance or beauty of Kocheishvili’s graphic, painterly, and relief works.

The works included in the exhibition possess a unique charm, due in no small part to the story of their survival. As fate would have it, in the early 1970s, the artist, having temporarily lost his studio, entrusted a folder of his works to a colleague for safekeeping—and did not see them again until 2010. Passing through the hands of several “custodians,” these works spent nearly thirty years under the bed of renowned art historian Yuri Gerchuk, who eventually returned them to the artist, intact and well-preserved.

In his drawings and sketches, many of which were shown to the public for the first time, the artist captured his friends — figures from the worlds of art, cinema, and theater. In Boris Kocheishvili’s sharply and distinctively drawn characters, one can easily recognize Genrikh Sapgir, Fazil Iskander, Dmitry Prigov, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Inna Churikova, and many others. The artist carefully selected the most successful life sketches and stored them in a cardboard box for… forty years.

The works presented at the exhibition expressed one of the main, programmatic ideas of the Moscow artist Boris Kocheishvili — the idea of merging Constructivism and Baroque in visual art. To combine, at first glance, the incompatible: the baroque dynamism, its weightless elegance, with the compositional clarity and logic of Constructivism. In the artist’s works, this remarkably simple yet new idea is realized in the selection of subjects and forms, in their plastic behavior on the page, and in the manipulation of space.