First, Pankin sees numerical structures as spatial systems: representing them in two-dimensional space is precisely what allows their geometric essence to be revealed. For example, the Fibonacci sequence numbers appear as a triangle, and thus their spatial embodiment determines the entire composition’s form.
Second, numbers are considered as plastic systems: rather than focusing on the literal depiction of digits, the artist symbolically modifies their visual qualities. The result is an algorithmic language, with ten figures corresponding to certain colour characteristics and correspondence scales forming at the intersection of subjective choice and objective patterns.
Third, the picture plane is regarded as a potential matrix structure: the very form of the matrix, defined by a table of numbers containing m rows and n columns, determines the composition.
One of the reasons behind "Alexander Pankin: Number as event" project being presented in Dubna is that the JINR Scientists’ Club hosted the artist’s 1985 debut solo exhibition marking the beginning of his public activity. Today, with algorithms and mathematical structures having become part of everyday user language, his artistic legacy is becoming particularly important: Pankin's works clearly demonstrate how artistic thought can not only reflect scientific progress, but also anticipate it by establishing formal principles for new ways of seeing and modelling the world.

Nikita Spiridonov

The exhibition is curated by Nikita Spiridonov – an artist and composer working at the intersection of visual art, sound, and urban environment studies. Nikita Spiridonov’s work integrates different approaches; his curatorial and artistic projects involve specialists from related disciplines, serving as platforms for interdisciplinary dialogue.

The JINR Gallery – the first professional exhibition hall in the Dubna science city – presents a project dedicated to one of the key science art artists, Alexander Pankin (1938–2020). This is the first large-scale retrospective since the artist’s final lifetime exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2019. Fifty works are on display – paintings, graphic art, installations, photos and videos from the Pankin family’s archive as well as the collections of Olga Popova, Sergey Popov, and artist Sergey Katran.
Alexander Pankin is an artist whose legacy is based on scientific principles and research, exploring both the past and the future. An architect by training, Pankin adhered to the structural discipline's principles – precision, modularity, and a systemic approach – in his work, offering plastic interpretations of mathematical abstractions in his paintings, graphic pieces, and later objects.
At the turn of the century, having shifted from his early expressionist paintings and 1970s–1980s metaphysical works, Pankin begins studying the language of non-objectivity, revealing new connections between art and mathematics – a genre he terms "meta-abstraction". The pieces of his mature period are based on irrational and transcendental numbers, numerical sequences manifesting their geometric nature through strict structures.
Cognitive computer graphics, developed by mathematician Alexander Zenkin and described in the 1992 book of the same name, played a significant role in shaping this method. It is based on the idea of transforming linear one-dimensional structures into a two-dimensional space, which makes it possible to visualise mathematical abstractions. Pankin based his Number as Art manifesto on the principle described by Zenkin. The artist wonders, "Is it possible to create an art piece adequate to a mathematical object?" and formulates three interrelated principles of the artistic method.

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12 February 2026 – 27 July 2026

Artefacts
of Francisco Infante

The theme of the JINR Gallery's first exhibition is not an accidental choice. The goal of science is to know the world, and its main tool is continuous experiment. Francisco Infante's creative path is an experiment that has been going on for more than sixty years and remains faithful to the idea based on the desire to comprehend the mystery of the universe and show the inexhaustibility of its forms of existence. Infante's art, like scientific discoveries that occurred as a result of random events or observations, was born as a result of the realisation that struck him in his youth, "the world around us is infinite". Attempts to find an answer to the question about the pillars of creation led him to invent the "visual metaphors of infinity", and then artefacts – installations built in nature using artificial objects: diverse, often multi-component movable mirror structures, compositions of wood, cardboard, paper, and threads. The artist's goal is to discover a "playing field" that, according to Infante's concept, allows him to control the attributes of nature itself: sunlight, air, snow, earth, and heaven. The result of the installations created by Infante together with his wife and co-author Nonna Goryunova is a series of photographs, each capturing a single point of view chosen by the author, presenting an "artistic event" to the viewer.

Francisco Infante's first exhibition in Dubna will help visitors trace the creative path of the outstanding artist and show the viability of the author's concept of an Artefact, which celebrates its half-century anniversary in 2026.

Curator of the exhibition: Irina Gorlova

The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an international intergovernmental research organization, is opening a new page in its history – the JINR Gallery, the first professional exhibition space in the science city of Dubna. The aim of the JINR Gallery is to popularise scientific knowledge through an open, accessible dialogue with the audience about the intersection and mutual enrichment of science and art. Here, within the walls of the International Conference Centre built in the era of Soviet modernism, art becomes a natural extension of the Institute's intellectual life, offering the international scientific community a universal language of artistic images and a place for free reflection.

The ArteFacts of Francisco InFante exhibition presents the works of one of the most famous artists of our time, a pioneer of kinetic art in Russia, the author of objects and installations, the creator of a special kind of art – an Artefact. Prepared jointly with the Veretevo Gallery, the project is not the first, but the most ambitious example of cooperation in culture between the two collaborating institutions. The exhibition showcases over 120 works from the master's collection, created from the 1960s to the mid-2020s, including new, never-before-presented works from the Spiral Eidos Symbols series and a kinetic object from the Hearts of Curved Space artefact series, recreated in the workshops of the Laboratory of High Energy Physics at JINR for the exhibition.

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