Everyone living in St Petersburg and beyond it knows the monument The Broken Ring, a dedicated to the Road of Life and installed on the shore of Lake Ladoga, where the only way from besieged Leningrad to the Big Land began. But not many people know that the author of the unique memorial is Konstantin Simun, an outstanding sculptor of the second half of the twentieth century.
The Unexpected Glance exhibition is a dedication to the oeuvre of Simun, who would have turned 90 on April 6, 2024. The best characterization of his work was once given by Tatiana Manturova, one of the leading researchers of Russian sculpture: "In a sense, Simun is a unique phenomenon. He was recognized both among the sculptors of the Matveev School and the new generation of artists who resolutely rejected the traditional path. Such unanimity can be explained by the sculptor's rare innate gift, the unconventionality of his thinking and the organic need to speak the language of his time".
Simun spoke the language of his time throughout his life. His early works from the 1960s already reflect the need to get out of the circle of conventional plasticity thinking, his interest in sharpened forms, and his experiments with materials. The main result of this search was The Broken Ring monument.
In the 1970s and early 1980s Simun became fascinated by the 18th century culture, which led to variants of the project of the statue of Mikhail Lomonosov, interpreted in terms of Baroque art. At the end of the 1980s, Simun broke with the tradition and turned to pop art, asserting the importance of the object as such or reinterpreted by the artist. Then he moved to the United States, where the work with the object acquired a different tonality. Simun discovered most interesting possibilities of working with plastic waste, the contents of the American garbage dump. He himself described this discovery as follows: ".... I scrutinized the objects that Americans once used. And I found what seemed to me to represent my new land of habitation <...> I discovered that the American vessel had absorbed <...> various early cultures of other peoples." At this time, Simun’s work became considerably more dramatic in meaning and emotional content.
The exhibition is a full-fledged overview of Simun's oeuvre with a focus on the main themes and images the sculptor was concerned with at different periods. In addition to works familiar to the public from the collection of the Museum of 20th–21st Century Art of St Petersburg, the State Museum of Urban Sculpture and private collections, it presents works exhibited for the first time that reveal the “backstage” of artistic thought and reflections on reality, clothed in experimental forms.
