For the third year running, Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Andrey Bartenev organize a festival for young illustrators.

llustration Festival 2009:

• includes more than 1000 new illustrations and 50 new videos of emerging and established artists;
• is a free job centre for artists, with each work at the show marked with contact information for direct communication between illustrators and their potential employers;
• opens with a large-scale intercultural program, which involves performances by music bands, performers and actors: Drugs group, The Miriads group, DJ Orange (Denis Simachev Bar), DJ Anton M (Calina Bar, Chapurin Bar), Sasha Frolova and AquaAerobica, Roma Ermakov, Katya Ryzhikova, Edik Katyhin, Maria Belikova, Katya Andreas, Kimbal Bumstead (UK).
• and also a SUPER-PUPER DJ set by Andrey Bartenev, the curator of the festival, at the afterparty in Wall Street Bar.
• presents a separate show at Domodedovo Art Gallery exhibition space in Domodedovo Moscow international airport within the framework of the program «Airport-city».

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The festival is meant to become an important event for an artist working in the field of illustration — one of the most demanded genres of visual impact, alongside advertising, show business, television, glossy magazines, packaging, and night clubs. This festival is a point of multi-synthesis, a crossroads of various techniques, figurative searches and formal experiments — all that is new, fresh, unexpected, all that can recharge the world of an illustrator.

The festival, conceived as a resource of contemporary illustration devices and creation methods, aims to develop creative potential, to produce the environment where artists can figure out contemporary trends and styles of drawing. The festival is also meant to bridge the gap between creative output and social demand for it.

The current theme is Internet, which today is an inexhaustible source of images for copying. The World Wide Web has become synonymous to endless duplication of current beauty standards and visual priorities. Image is now publicly available. The Internet is artificial nature, which contemporary artists attempt to reproduce. Image reproduction involves self-education and self-discipline; it is a special way of world cognition. This practice gives rise to new esthetics, visual trends, and new subjects.

Any person can pick up an image one likes in the Internet, edit it, and then publish it back in the Web — this is how information reproduces in the net, this is how visual netcyclopedia is updated, how it goes global and universal. This is how multiple servers with different specializations, themes, and moods are created...

Special projects:

Kimbal Bumstead In Transit: Moscow.

The festival program comprises 3 areas of focus:

I. Illustration collection — a selection of best works created by the artists in the past year on the subject of the festival, «Free Wi-Fi». This is a true illustrators’ exchange: each work bears the artist’s name and e-mail. Free illustrators’ exchange will allow employing young talents — the display is organized as a telephone book, the artists are presented in alphabetical order, and their contact information is easily accessible — it is part of the image.

II. Video-art series prepared by illustrators, web designers, and photographers who contribute to fashion magazines.

III. Personal projects by artists reflecting trends in contemporary culture presenting possible career options for an illustrator:

• Katya Ryzhikova
  Katya Ryzhikova’s personal project «Self-Images of Self-Cognition» is a model of the world in which mental energies are evoked by ethnic symbols. Bright paints and lines of fluorescent illumination open spiritual layers of positive emotions of improvement. «Self-Cognition» signs live and manifest themselves both in internal, and in external compositional plots, they are in permanent conflict with the world of pragmatism and through this conflict find new forms.
• Sasha Frolova and Irina Voiteleva
  The project by Sasha Frolova and Irina Voiteleva is a visual portal into the future. Futuristic art visualizes the reality of tomorrow: it is possible to see the future, to cross over time barriers with the help of imagination.

Contests:

• Three contests for young artists were launched as part of the festival:
• Design Contest organized by Andrey Bartenev and «RIPOL classic» Publishing house for illustrating «Godzilla Syndrome», a best-seller novel about the Internet, written by well-known French writer Fabris Colen;
• Best Crocodile image contest, launched by BAIBAKOV art projects contest;
• «Russian Edition: New Hope» contest, organized by «Hooligan» magazine with the support of Kak.ru and Andrey Bartenev.

If you miss the opening you can watch it live at.