Rome, the National Etruscan Museum opens to the contemporary: young Evgeny Antufiev on display

From June 11 to September 26,ETRU - National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia opens to contemporary art by hosting the solo exhibition of the young Russian artist Evgeny Antufiev (Kyzyl, 1986) entitled Dead Nations. Eternal version, curated by Marina Dacci and Svetlana Marich. The exhibition offers the public the works resulting from Evgeny Antufiev’s reading of the Italian archaeological heritage, sedimented in the territory and preserved in museums. The Russian artist undergoes a strong fascination with the sign and symbolic layering and the deep echo of ancient stories that continue to speak to us from museum halls. The museum therefore felt that there was a great fit with a contemporary artist who has always explored the idea of immortality and regeneration through archetypes that have accompanied human existence and imagination in an endless history.

Antufiev therefore meets the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia to absorb and metabolize contacts and relations with multiple civilizations (from East to West, from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, to the Carthaginians) and to seal a new chapter in his production inspired by archaeology. Antufiev’s work transports through time and space symbolic figures that have always accompanied human existence and imagination. His ceramics as well as castings, with textures and surfaces oxidized and treated with special patinas and baths, evoke ancient discoveries and are intended to appear as a “gift” unearthed underground. And according to the institute, the presence of transforming figures fits well with the Etruscan iconographic repertoire that is illustrated in the objects on display in the Villa Giulia Museum. Antufiev’s works take on hybrid identities, capable of generating assonances between different worlds and cultures, but they are inevitably filtered through the culture of the artist’s area of origin, Siberia, and the Russian folk tradition in the treatment of materials.

“To greet us in the garden,” Marina Dacci writes, “a travertine obelisk, an invitation to the celebration of what cannot be swallowed by oblivion, of what cannot die. Ultimate goal of a museum? A small fountain, in the hemicycle, is a tribute to water, a key element of the passage of time and vital transformation. Reaching the precious Nymphaeum, a terracotta vase, in dialogue with the bodies of caryatids, evokes the feminine receptive principle, origin of life and source of nourishment. The exhibition develops in a specific wing of the museum grafting itself into its framework, creating an exchange with the present heritage. The small interventions in the display cases do not interrupt the historical collections: Antufiev reinterprets the objects-originally created for functional and decorative purposes-transforming the vision of an artifact into a work of art. Many of these objects found in tombs as grave goods (testifying to the importance of a fundamental rite of passage between life and death) offer a figurative repertoire including mainly fantastic animals drawn from orientalizing bestiaries that take on the significance of tomb guardians: an iconography strongly present in Antufiev’s formal research. Finally, the exhibition lands in a phantasmagorical museum room created within the museum: a fictitious space in which the artist stages, within vitrines and display cases, imaginative relationships between objects and figures of his own production, mostly castings and terracottas, a tribute to the refined Etruscan craftsmanship that was expressed mainly with these materials.”

“Evgeny Antufiev’s extensive research into extinct cultures and their artifacts,” writes Svetlana Marich, “leads his artistic practice to the creation of works that become timeless symbols: mirrors, warriors, masks, knives and vases take on cultural relevance for any era, and thus the dense dialogue between ancient found objects and newly made art objects is presented as a celebration of life, moving from previous centuries to the contemporary world and the future, spreading from a museum context to contemporary and future families, linking our memories with the reality of generations to come. The visual patterns Evgeny introduces within his practice do not become solely a constellation of objects: the marble obelisk placed in the space at the center of Villa Giulia stands as another solid element on the map of the world made of man-made obelisks, adding Rome in the constellation of obelisks of Cairo, Paris, New York, the Vatican, Istanbul, Luxor, of Judea, connecting ancient times with the growing contemporary culture. The materialization of new art objects with the pre-existing museum and even urban context always restores their spatial coordinates, and in Antufiev’s case, rises to the level of awakening a synergy that did not exist before. The artist and his world of objects integrated into the space of Villa Giulia, historically rich in heterogeneous codes and meanings, leads us to accrue new sensations, demonstrating how our time is deeply connected with the past and the future, beautifully interwoven into each other in a timeless language of art.”

Evgeny Antufiev lives and works in Moscow. After studying at theInstitute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Moscow, he won the Kandinsky Prize in 2009 and 2019 in The young artist and Project of the Year categories, respectively. In 2021 he will participate in Soft Water Hard Stone, the 5th edition of the New Museum Triennial in New York, curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring (curators at the New Museum), Jamillah James (Senior Curator at ICA Los Angeles).

In 2019 he is invited to participate in the 5th Ural Biennial and the group exhibition Jeunes artistes en Europe - Les métamorphoses at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. From the same year is the special project Dead Nations. Golden Age Version in the Church of San Giuseppe alle Scalze in Naples, curated by Marina Dacci. In 2018 he participated in Manifesta 12, in Palermo, with When art became part of the landscape. Chapter I, a project for the Salinas Museum curated by Marina Dacci and Giusi Diana. Of the same year is the solo exhibition, When art became part of the landscape: part 3, at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow and the bi-personal exhibition at the Konekov Museum in Moscow. During 2017 he exhibits at MHKA - Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, at MOSTYN in Wales and at the Garage Triennale of Contemporary Art at the Garage Museum in Moscow. In 2016 he was invited by Christian Jankowski to participate in Manifesta 11 with a special project, and in September 2016 he participated in Kabaret Kultura at the Whitechapel in London with a perfomance. In previous years, his solo exhibitions include: MMOMA, Moscow (2015) Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2014), Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2013) and among group exhibitions: New Museum, New York (2011) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).

His works are present in the collections of the most important international Museums and Institutions: Credit Suisse Collection; International Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; TATE Modern, London; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; MHKA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.

For all information you can visit the official website of ETRU - Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia.

Pictured: Evgeny Antufiev, Untitled (2020; bronze and carnelian, 38 x 30 x 18 cm). Ph credit: Evgeny Antufiev & z2o Sara Zanin

Rome, the National Etruscan Museum opens to the contemporary: young Evgeny Antufiev on display

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