In the Art XO gallery, the multimedia exhibition Death Mill / Day by the Estonian artist Aleksej Gordins will be on display.

The main theme of Alexey Gordin’s artistic activity is absurd stereotypical patterns of thinking and behavior in modern society. His works are almost always narrative in nature and often tell the story of exciting or annoying situations. One of his main themes has become the harsh reality of the art world, and the main character is the artist himself. The scenes filled with dark humor deconstruct the image of the professional art world as something elitist and glamorous.

The name of the exhibition comes from a rare natural phenomenon with the name The mill of death. In this phenomenon, a group of ants separates from the main forager, loses the pheromone trail, and begins to follow each other in a constantly rotating circle. Thousands of ants go in such circles until they die or one comes back to its senses, breaking the circle.

With the help of this phenomenon, Alexei Gordin points to the mass obsession with vague concepts and the repetition of history. Although there has been tremendous scientific progress, humanity’s most dire problems such as poverty, hunger, resource scarcity, and war still exist. Alexey Gordin does not work directly with history and specific social problems, mostly he passes everything through the prism of his artistic existence, just like a sponge that filters dirty water through the body. Reflecting certain conditions of the society of his era, Aleksei Gordin tries to dissect the society by analyzing the creative individual. In other words, the personality of the artist becomes the protagonist of his works, which becomes a landmark, pointing to wider processes in culture, society and politics.

The new paintings created for this exhibition are full of self-irony and are open attempts to talk about serious things using the language of humor and absurdity. The artist believes that the entire history of mankind is nothing but an absurd carnival, and therefore nothing should be taken seriously. In the works of Alexei Gordin, the personality of the artist is often presented as an outsider and a clown. However, often the persona of the clown is the most tragic and the wisest. Most of the work shows that the concept of the modern clown is inseparable from the meme culture that has been defining our everyday life for the last 10 years. Fascinating and transformed images with a simple message have replaced long, complex textual concepts in literature and philosophy, demonstrating the need for a simplified understanding of truth to respond to the triumph of post-truth. This exhibition is one big fiction that tries to deconstruct reality, because what we see can become something completely different. Like ants trapped in a circle of death, the audience is trapped in the illusory world of the artist’s fears and dislikes related to his daily struggle in the art world and the world at large.

“I mostly work with found images. I surf a lot on the Internet, and I just can’t avoid some images. My brain constantly creates short phrases, slogans, poems, sentences that need to be visually illustrated. That’s how I combine text and image. Sometimes, when I don’t find anything interesting picture, I can only draw text, turning letters into pictures. Today’s visual culture is nothing but endless repetition of the same thing. Simple picture and text is something we like very much. We don’t need long readings and complex compositions anymore . My desire for realism in painting comes from an instinctive rejection of the endless postmodern replica,” Aleksei Gordins.

Aleksej Gordins was born in 1989 in Tomsk, Siberia, in a family of exiles. Studied painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2008-2011, BA) and the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts (2014-2016, MFA). In the last 15 years, he has held 22 personal exhibitions and participated in 46 group exhibitions in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, South Korea, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Finland, Italy and France. In 2017, he won the Young Painter Award (Young Painter Prize). Artist’s works in public collections: Tartu Art Museum (Tartu, Estonia), Kuku Kultuuritorn (Tallinn, Estonia), Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA (Helsinki, Finland), National Gallery of Lithuania (Vilnius, Lithuania), Zuzāni Collection, Art Center Zuzeum (Riga, Latvia). Aleksej Gordins lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia.