The Museum of 20th-21st Century Art of St Petersburg presents the retrospective exhibition Golden Section. 60×100, dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Sotnikov (1961-2015), who became a legend of St Petersburg art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The exhibition presents experimental art objects of fabric, ceramics and plywood, in which the artist appears in the role characteristic of the Leningrad young avant-garde of the 1980s, as a performance artist, in the most unexpected guises. His portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, nudes and genre compositions are inspired by the art of primitive tribes, archaic traditions, folk art and the Russian avant-garde. His works are inhabited by character-symbols that are on the verge of fairy tale unreality. Such characters can be Christmas trees, “leggy” cars, Aurora ships, fishes, mausoleums and skulls. In his paintings one can see the intellectual and witty play with the art history of the "Hermitage" child who grew up in the family of historians, Marina Sotnikova and Yury von Stackelberg.

Ivan Sotnikov was a founder of the groups Zero Movement and the New Artists, participant of the first street exhibitions and Sergei Kuryokhin’s Pop Mechanics band, chair of the Folk Art Lover’s club, collector, member of the Mayakovsky Friends’ Club, the Museum of Creative Communities, painter, graphic artist, sculptor, animator, etc. An important aspect of Ivan’s life was a peculiar dualism: in 1996 he became a priest and for several years he practically stopped working as artist. Having resumed his artistic career in the mid-2000s, he retained both the indomitable temperament of the “wild artist” Ivan Sotnikov and the piety of Father Ivan. Like all the major figures of the new culture of this period, Sotnikov had many facets of the realization of his talent, and his creative activity knew no bounds.