Hours: 26.08–12.09.2019, Mon–Sun, 10:00–20:00

Opening reception: 28 August 2019, Wednesday, at 19:00

Venue: Moscow, Artplay, Nizhnyaya Syromyatnicheskaya 10, bldg. 9, entrance 3A (entrance to VBShD), 2nd floor, “Laboratory” hall

Admission is free.

All works are available for purchase.


The exhibition of artist Ilya Drozdov “Everyone Is Here!” brings together works from several series. The leitmotif of the show is Paradise — an ideal real and unreal world of Good that is impossible without the world of Evil. The artist invites us to imagine on this theme and to picture that we are already HERE — each of us in our own ideal world.

It was Paradise that the first explorers of painting sought. Later, Jan van Huysum, Jan van Dael, Jan van Os, and Jan van Brussel tried to speak of it, depicting the long, hard journey of a little ant home to its anthill along peony petals and a bumblebee’s voyage along a tulip stem, building an ideal composition of fruit and flowers, light and shadow as a set in a vast theatre, describing a lush theatrical, compositional drama. The viewer’s task is to look closely at the ant on the leaf and see the Birth of Adam.

But everyone has their own Paradise, and so as an epigraph to his painting exhibition Ilya Drozdov chose a line by Bulat Okudzhava: “Each hears how he breathes; as he breathes, so he writes, with no wish to please...” 

Ilya Drozdov

Artist and member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia. Born in Moscow. He lived and worked in Jerusalem for several years. For more than 15 years, he worked as an artist and designer for renowned magazines. He has participated in numerous exhibitions across Russia.

Ilya Drozdov’s paintings are distinguished by their impeccably constructed compositions, the lightness and refinement of his brushwork, and their intensely heightened, almost exaggerated colour. His works are held in private collections in Russia, Israel, and Canada. 

“Whether it is a landscape or a still life, a genre scene or a portrait, the work must resound with music, with the rustling of leaves and the blowing of the wind. Without this, there is no art.”

Artist’s Manifesto

“Five centuries of experience, from the pioneers to our contemporaries, offer boundless scope for our imagination; the titans are gone, but they left the door open—come in, take what you need, make use of it. But take with care, with talent, with attention; otherwise, what is the point of it all if it is done carelessly and without talent?

 We copy, and then copy again and again, but after tentative scales and the search for colour and sound, the time comes to play so loudly that everyone can hear, to cry out at the top of one’s voice.

Here I am!

To create a composition so audacious that the Dutch masters would gasp; to build upon their experience, to move away from lavish bouquets, and to make each petal a metre by a metre, crying out: “Here I am!” 

Did it work? Hardly! Everything vanishes. Another attempt is needed to catch up with light and shadow. And so, another canvas is needed.

“...Consider how the flowers of the field grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.”

This is my quest and my choice!”