MOSCOW.- The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a solo show of the artist Valery Chtak If My Way — No Way. The exhibition is divided into several sections, which define the artist’s identity. These are a subcultural cluster, music studio, workshop, etc. The exhibition is located on four floors of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Ermolaevsky Lane and brings together works of various genres and techniques, the majority of which will be created directly in the Museum’s halls.

The Chtak’s show is a total installation. Each element of the exhibition having a compositional and meaningful completeness belongs to a single symbolic system — collection of witty phrases, aphorisms, common symbols, banalities and manifestations of mass and popular culture, numerical and text riddles, borrowings and citations from music, literature, visual art and philosophy, which the artist has been “accumulating” for his practice.

Chtak uses diverse ways for appealing the viewer: in the halls there will be his spatial frescoes and murals (small format canvases and pieces of cardboard), graphic series, posters and T-shirts as if brought from the concert of a heavy metal group, and skateboard decks. This variety of expressive means is not only a demonstration of the artist’s coolness, but also his reflection on the nature of creativity connected with the search of new possibilities of the art language and response to the question “What does it mean to be an artist today?”. Or to be more exact “What does it mean today to be an f*cking awesome contemporary artist?”

Valery Chtak (b. 1981) is a Russian artist. Since 1998 he attended Avdey Ter-Oganyan School of Contemporary Art and in 2000 — 2005 was a member of the “Radek” group — an association of artists, musicians and cultural activists set up on the basis of TerOganyan School. Since 2002 Chtak has been regularly participating in group exhibitions in Russia and other countries and implementing his personal projects. He was nominated for the State Prize in Contemporary Art “Innovation” in the New Generation nomination (Only the Truth project, 2011). The artist’s works are in collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation, as well as in private collections of Pierre Brochet, Andrey Tretyakov, Samir Sabe d’Akra and others.

Alexey Maslyaev (b. 1985) is a curator, culturologist, Head of the Sector for Research and Methodical Work of the Education Department of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). Among his major curator’s works are “Junk” (MMOMA, Moscow, 2010), “Affirmative Actions” (Artplay, Moscow, 2010), “I Always Knew We’ll Meet” (Arthouse Squat Forum, Moscow, 2011), “Let Me Be Part of the Narrative” (Paperworks gallery, Moscow, 2012), “No Water Tomorrow” (MMOMA, Moscow,2013; the National Center for Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg, 2014), “The Story Must To Be Continued” (exhibition hall of the Artists’ Union of the Republic of Dagestan, Makhachkala, 2013), “Dagestan. Not for Sale” (ArtSummer gallery, Istanbul, 2014), “Museum Looks” (MMOMA, Moscow, 2014-15). He is a nominee for the State Prize in Contemporary Art “Innovation” in the Curator’s Project nomination (exhibition “No Water Tomorrow” and the Regional Project nomination (exhibition “The Story Must To Be Continued”; a nominee for Sergey Kuryokhin Prize in Contemporary Art in The Best Curator’s Project nomination (exhibition “No Water Tomorrow”).