First of All, It’s Beautiful

The concept behind the project "First of All, It's Beautiful" is to bring the image of nuclear explosions into every home. It should become part of the interior, just as the thought of civilization's end should become part of our worldview. That is why we choose an artistic language maximally adapted to contemporary culture, drawing on art that resonates with a broad audience: Impressionism, Pop Art, and Arte Povera.

The project is presented as an installation assembled from various works made in different techniques and sizes. All elements of the exhibition are grouped in the form of a fair booth or tourist kiosk, where all the artifacts are piled on top of one another. This accumulation itself becomes the final exhibition version of the project. The works themselves were created using a specialized AI platform developed by my team.

Not every gallerist becomes an artist. For me, the catalyst was the war — more precisely, Putin's aggression against Ukraine, and essentially against the entire world. From the very beginning, when Putin started blackmailing the world with the threat of nuclear war, I understood that he might actually press the red button. But the difficulty was that he wanted the world to recognize this threat and be afraid. If I addressed it directly, I would be playing his game.

After living with this thought for a while, I suddenly realized that civilization is finite one way or another — just as a human being is mortal. Whether it is Putin who destroys it, or someone else, is only a matter of time. As Chekhov said: if a gun hangs on the wall in the first act, it will go off in the third. The end of civilization is predetermined — be it a nuclear explosion, another pandemic, or a meteor strike.

It is important for people to recognize this inevitability, yet not to fear it, but to keep living. It resembles a child's first awareness of mortality: at the age of ten, a child thinks about death for the first time, feels frightened, then forgets — but the thought returns later. As we grow up, we learn to live with the awareness of life's finitude, overcoming the fear of death. Death is a recurring theme in literature and cinema and becomes part of rituals. In the same way, by accepting the fragility of civilization, we continue to exist meaningfully — in a sense, having "tamed" that thought.