The exhibition continues the reflection on the memorial function of flowers in Anastasia Rybakova’s dialogue with the creative legacy of Vadim Sidur. The project is about a feeling of tender sadness, told from the perspective of flowers. What disappears leaves a subtle imprint on the soul.

A secret garden, hidden beneath the earth, sprouts into the gallery space, where the feeling of loss acquires a quiet, almost tangible language. The flower becomes both a participant in the memorial process and a symbol of memory — and an almost elusive trace of human experience. Daisies and “garden aliens” speak of what is usually left unsaid.

Is it possible to fully convey the joy of meeting or the unbearable weight of loss through a bouquet of flowers? In Anastasia Rybakova’s works, floral images exist on the border between the ephemeral and the eternal. In this borderline state, what emerges is what in Japanese culture is called nagori — a luminous longing for what is already passing but has not yet completely disappeared.

In every image — sorrow, resistance, tenderness, vulnerability, a gentle attachment to what cannot be held. The touching and at the same time romantic titles of the works — “The Sleeping Sad Aster,” “The Pink Pair on the Heated Granite Triangle,” “The Half of a Dying Chamomile Bouquet” — continue this minor-key state in unison with the plastic language of Vadim Sidur’s funerary monuments.

Symbolically, Sidur’s studio was located in the basement of a residential building, and he himself “sprouted from the Basement,” transforming grief into a lyrical and deeply human statement. Among the dozens of works he created, some were installed as gravestones. Personal memorials, dedicated to those who died young or under tragic circumstances, became for Sidur one of the first forms of entering the public space.

The image of the flower is also important for Sidur’s mythopoetic and graphic legacy — it becomes quite literally a metaphor for existence. In his poetry collection The Happiest Autumn, the sculptor repeatedly returns to the poetic formula “I – am a flower…”: he calls himself now an autumn flower, now a forgotten one, now a hybrid, now a prophet sprouting in a post-apocalyptic landscape. For both artists, the flower is not decorative embellishment but a form of existence — a stubborn and tender continuation of life, even when life itself resonates at its limit.

In this silence, the duration of pain and the grounding power of love coexist — two states that do not cancel each other out but maintain a fragile balance. And thus loss appears not as emptiness, but as the living fabric of memory — bitter, silken, and luminous in its elusiveness.

Ekaterina Novokshonova

Press release