Dead and Alive: Collaboration

Dead and Alive: Collaboration became Pavel Kir’s first major solo exhibition in Russia and one of the artist’s most large-scale projects.For the first time, Tsifergaus, one of Europe’s leading digital art galleries, opened its space to analogue painting, graphic art, and photography.

The project was built as a dialogue with those whom the artist calls his Reference Group — authors, thinkers, and directors who shaped his inner artistic landscape. From Malevich and Magritte to Parajanov and Bacon, it was not about quotation or imitation, but about an ongoing conversation through time.

Across the exhibition’s five halls, visitors encountered painting, graphic art, Street Post-Photography Painting (StripleP), as well as large-scale video works created with the use of artificial intelligence. More than 5,000 visitors attended the exhibition, and its finale became a performance and a private auction, during which eight works by the artist were acquired by collectors for a total amount exceeding $90,000.

This interdisciplinary project became an important milestone in the formation of Pavel Kir’s own artistic method — Surgical Surrealism, in which the line acts as a scalpel and color as a means of healing. The exhibition also marked the first public presentation of the artist’s emerging direction — Street Post-Photography Painting.