“The sleep of reason produces monsters. Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels”
Francisco de Goya, 1797

The participants of the group exhibition “Phantasy in Everyday Life” are well known to the visitors of Erarta. Over the recent years, many of them have presented their solo projects in the museum.

The idea of arranging this show came from observing the exhibition process which has been a real phantasmagoria over the years! Dull pictures of post-apocalypse were followed by lyrics, aspiring both to the past and to the future; recognizable urban landscapes were suddenly coloured with oases of flora and fauna from psychedelic dreams, and the descendants of the unconscious have settled down in the museum halls.

The very exhibition space is a fantasy on the topic of permeability of mental worlds. Imagine that fantasies of other people have suddenly become visible, and look around.

The first work that greets visitors at the entrance — “Diogenes” by Aleksey Chizhov is the allegory epigraph for the exhibition. A naked figure is deeply plunged into the unconscious. He might be watching the movement of archetypal images. Such spectacle can be tiresome and cause the ripple effect of vision.

The visitors of “Phantasy in Everyday Life” will see a serious-minded fat, a dolphin with a cat's head and a log that is taking off into space.

A separate part of the exhibition is a science fiction section.

Fantasy is parasitically attached to reality and everyday life. Its basic technique is violation of borders and standards, but it doesn’t happen every day. Fantasy is activated only when the reality becomes unbearably real. A lot of authors use this particular optics, revealing the miraculous in the ordinary.

One of the key subjects of fantasy artists is metamorphosis or transformation. If you look into a real object for a while, it will respond in kind.

Artists: 

Dmitry Margolin, Konstantin Novikov, Andrey Kuzmin, Aleksey Semichev, Alexey Chizhov, Rostand Tovasiev, Egor Schablykin, Kseniya Ostrovskaya, Denis Patrakeev, Anna Kagadeeva, Vladimir Medvedev, Porphiriy Fedorin, Mikhail Gavrichkov, Philipp Legashov, Stanislav Kazimov, Ivan Streltsov, Ivan Favn, Alexey Andreev, Denis Prasolov, Natalia Pivko, Natalia Klimenko, Aleksander Grekov, Alexander Kompaniets, Andrey Kostylev, Yulia Nizamutdinova.