Dasha Delone
About Dasha Delone
Dasha Delone belongs to The Third Avant-garde movement. As an artist she is a complex phenomenon with a pretty long story behind – the story of Painter, Poet, Designer, Publisher and Equestrian thatcome upon the stage interchangeably to engender the extremely eventful life. The events in their turn are reflected on canvas as flowers and dragons, bottles and Valkyries, pirates and musicians. In the beginning were Russian medieval booklore, manuscript miniatures and restoration of old rural churches. At the same time Dasha Delone studied the art and the science of graphic design and typography at Boris Trofimov’s studio. Oil painting, regarded then as the essential and indispensable element of artistic education, Dasha Delone mastered at an exquisite private art studio – a sort of a free academy bringing to mind the atmosphere of impressionists’ Paris. Then there came to her life an avant-garde ceramist Irina Labutina, rock’n’roll, hippie vagrancies, philosophy, mystics, poetry and music. Early in the 1990s Dasha Delone dedicated herself to studying ceramics, enamels, chemistry, the ways of obtaining pure colours. Oil painting re-entered her life as a form of nonverbal poetry. Colours, paint, canvases and brushes were much more amenable to the touch than the spangles and gadgets around. It all started with dragons and fish. The creatures were virtually alive, almost independent of the authors will. The way naïve painters like to put it: I was about to paint something quite different, but this one appeared by its own out of nowhere. While painting a tram Dasha Delone gets a dragon; she is painting a fish – and all of a sudden the Parcae saddle its chine. Dasha Delone’s art makes me muse on the artistic avant-garde – and to perceive it as the kind of art that is by no means based on an ideology or a philosophy of any kind. Avant-garde is rather a sort of a fair-tale existentialism – actually a variant of realism, but of the realism dealing with its specific, totally exotic reality. Avant-garde as it reveals itself in Dasha Delone’s works is the creativity based upon the centuries-long cultural experience of a metropolitan dweller who is not all the while suppressed by the burden of his cultural background – but instead knows how to pilot his old-timer aeroplane toward the territory with the climate ideally tuned up for dragons to live. Early in the 1990s Dasha Delone and her friends founded a nonconformist art-group “The Three Oranges”, but the time in those days was not ripe for nonconformity. Nowadays she is a co-founder of “Everything is Art” association with more than 800 members united by one and the only quality of standing out against the background of the general artistic landscape. by Lisa Plavinsky member of International Association of Art Critics Less
Education:
Studied arts at a number of art schools, as well as at Boris Trofimov’s and Irina Borisova’s workshops.
1994 – artistic director of a ceramics studio.
Since 1991 Dasha Delone is a member of TheInternational Association of Art, IAA/AIAP.Less
Exhibitions:
2015
• “Thoughts Aloud!”, Moscow, Zverev Contemporary Arts Center (curator Olga Bozhko)
• “Everything is Art” gallery, at the Affordable art fair Singapore
• “Ceremonial portrait”, Moscow, Studio50A, Studio Kop (curators Olga Bozhko and Aglaya Feneva)
2014
• Solo exhibition “Not Exactly Animals”, Moscow, Zverev Contemporary Arts Center
• “Everything is Art” gallery, at the Kölner Liste art-fair, Cologne, Germany
• “The First Catalogue of the Third Avant-garde, Moscow, Zverev Contemporary Arts Center (curators Liza Plavinskaya and Oleg “Zak” Ponomariov)
2013
Museum of Everything. Exhibition №5, Moscow, Garage Art Gallery
• Exhibition of “Everything is Art” artists’ association as part of the Sakhart festival, Moscow
• “Calendar Presentation”, Moscow, Artplay Gallery, “Volna” bar
• “The Third Avant-Garde. North Pole” project, on board of the nuclear-powered icebreaker “50 Let Pobedy” and at the North Pole itself
• “Everything is Art” gallery, at the Aqua Art Miami contemporary art fair, Miami-Beach, USA
2012
• Solo exhibition “Everything’s Not Now”, Moscow, Pokrovka, 27
• “Melomaniacs-2”, Moscow, Zverev Contemporary Arts Center
• The First Exhibition of the Third Avant-garde, Pokrovka, 27
2011
• “God, Chicks and Booze”, Moscow, Vspolny Art Gallery
2010
• “A Small Exhibition”, Moscow, Pokrovka, “Everything is Art” gallery (curator Victor Orekhanov)
• “Melomaniacs”, Moscow, Zverev Contemporary Arts Center
2009
• Solo exhibition “By Tail and Claw”, Moscow, Arbat, Liza Plavinskaya’s appartement
• “Universam” – the bazaar of artists’ associations” as part of the parallel program of the Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Izvestia-Hall
1991
• “Malaya Gruzinskaya, 28”, Moscow Manege Art Gallery
Dasha Delone’s works are presented at The Museum of Everything, London; at Viatka Contemporary Arts Museum; and in several private collections. Less