Scaramouche is pleased to present a solo exhibition by prominent Moscow-based artist Dmitry Gutov. “In Our Days, Everything Seems Pregnant with its Contrary” features a new collection of tall, plinth-like canvases marked by theses from Karl Marx’s People’s Paper, Grundrisse, and other publications and speeches. With typography reminiscent of El Lissitzky’s poster designs and other Constructivist propaganda, Gutov resuscitates the fertile but brief avant-garde legacy of Leninist Russia only to abstract it. Breaking, fragmenting, and otherwise layering text, Gutov’s stylization both obscures and highlights his Communist source material, an apt painterly manifestation of an ephemeral moment in Soviet history when society was both class-less and post-capitalist. Complemented by a group of smaller paintings in the project space, “In Our Days, Everything Seems Pregnant with its Contrary” is only the latest development for an artist preoccupied with this Soviet epoch; it must, in Gutov’s words, be “pieced together again from fragments, from feeble traces in the ruins, from scraps, intimations and shadows.”

Dmitry Gutov studied at the Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, Moscow and the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Saint Petersburg. Recent solo exhibitions include Chaotic Notes at Taiss Gallery, Paris, Death and the Artist at M&J Guelman Gallery, Moscow, and Relativism is Dialectics for Idiots at Scaramouche, Volta, New York. Notable group exhibitions include The Potosi Principle at Reina Sofia National Museum and Art Center, Madrid, Thaw: Russian Art, From Glasnost to the Present at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, Think with the Sense—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, and Russia! at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.