Alexei Gordin. This Land is Your Land

You are invited to the opening of Alexei Gordin’s solo exhibition This Land is Your Land on 3 October at 6:00 p.m. at Tallinn City Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Tamara Luuk.

Alexei Gordin’s self-fashioned, forthrightly stated artist persona is grounded above all in his painting – a practice steeped in grotesque, tongue-in-cheek critique. To give a fuller sense of his sensibility, we present a selection of his numerous social media posts, where phone snapshots and video clips open onto worlds filled with harmony, beauty, and balance.

It is no coincidence that we focus on Alexei’s Instagram Stories – the phone photos made by millions today, appearing and vanishing in a constant stream, accessible to all, with no museum ticket or gallery rental fee. Among his thousands of snaps, which capture the decorous and the less decorous moments of everyday life, one finds images of surprising beauty. Taken by someone with a trained eye and a ready sense of wonder, they are mostly landscapes and cityscapes, shot locally and on the road. If we set aside the graffiti that accompanies the memory, decay, and dereliction of human-made buildings and interiors, there is little grotesque or irony here; instead, there is the beauty of colour, light, and form – an aesthetic neither singled out by critics nor emphasised by the artist himself. Without seeking to stake a claim in the art world, these snapshots teach us to love the life we too easily lose sight of while busy criticising ourselves and others.