Sometimes it is enough to stand by the window of a train passing through a forest, or to look at a lake—and something inside lets go. The city is made up of achieving goals, buildings, loud sounds, and haste.

Nature works differently. A tree does not rush to grow; it follows its own cycle. Water does not argue with the shore; it simply flows. This exhibition is about the state we return to as soon as we leave the city: the rustle of leaves, the wind in a field, the sound of a stream, silence.

The route through the halls is structured as a journey—from forest to field, from field to water, and at the end, a hall where nothing remains but color and silence: abstraction as the point at which the landscape dissolves into a state of pure calm. Along the way you will encounter almost sterile works, devoid of the disharmony that humans and traces of their presence usually bring into nature. Only occasionally will you encounter entities and objects that show that harmony between humans and nature is still possible. Emptiness here is a space one can enter and finally not think about anything.

A meditative state does not have to be sought far away. A fragment of bark from a walk, a dried branch, a spruce cone, a curious stone—this is enough to create a small point of silence at home: a place to return to when your life again becomes too full of bustle. At the exhibition we offer a similar experience—you are at once in the city, in the space of the gallery, and surprisingly far from it, among forest, fields, and water. Pause before any work a little longer than usual. What do you hear when you look at water? Which mountain, field, or forest is your own place of power?

Maxim Pyshnenko — curator