Alexander Pankin: NUMBER AS EVENT

Alexander Pankin:
NUMBER AS EVENT

In every art, the number remains

the final abstract expression.

Wassily Kandinsky

The JINR Gallery — the first professional exhibition hall in the Dubna science city — presents a project dedicated to one of the key contemporary 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.

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.

NUMBER AS SUBJECT 1

In his creative search, Alexander Pankin focuses on visualising numerical series and irrational numbers as well as on spatial representation of mathematical objects.

Pankin created the Margin Notes series amid a surge of interest in the Russian avant-garde. Each canvas features a "copy" of a painting by Kazimir Malevich, explored from a mathematical standpoint and revealing flawless proportions and harmonic patterns reminiscent of the Renaissance. In Margin Notes, the "commentary" integrates naturally into the piece: "a framework is designed to see the unseen and manifest the unreal into existence".

Another opus of suprematism research is the Imaginary Black Square diptych. In the accompanying text, Pankin writes about one of his most famous discoveries — the equality of black and white areas in Malevich's 1915 painting. When speaking about the positive and negative fields — the black and the white — Pankin refers to the geometry of the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky, rooted in the understanding of "the duality of the entire manifold spacetime".

NUMBER AS SUBJECT 2

One of the central motifs of the hall is the famous Fibonacci sequence (a series in which each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on). Thus, the question of finding an artistic form of numerical ideas becomes the most exciting for Pankin. The Fibonacci Sequence Triangle in Space diptych, declarative in scale, is a "pure" geometric expression of linear structures. It embodies the pathos of a breakthrough beyond human capabilities — towards the infinite Universe — characteristic of the Sixtiers (translator’s note: the 1950s — 1960s generation of the Soviet intelligentsia). In a way, the Fibonacci Sequence Triangle in Space paraphrases The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, a famous installation by another representative of the generation, Ilya Kabakov.

IN MAGIC CIRCLE

In the Soviet times, research institutes often assumed the unspoken function of contemporary art centres. For several decades since its foundation, the Scientists’ Club of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna served as a venue for exhibitions of unofficial art, modern music, and screenings of films of different countries.

Pankin's 1985 personal exhibition at the JINR Scientists' Club — In Magic Circle, curated by Violetta Mukhoyarova, marked the beginning of his public activity as an artist. Works from several successive periods were on display. Now, however, the selection of the same 1960s – 1980s works reveals new connections, allowing us to assess the analytical complexity of the collage and assemblage pieces (Interior. Blues, Dedicated to Lucio Fontana) and highlight a series of portraits where the subject is recognised through minimal visual means. Pankin is interested not only in portraiture, but also in metaphorical similarity: while the "red" Mayakovsky is unmistakable, Whitman can be identified as a character — the hero of his own poem with a fiery eye, the sun, crowning his head.

Two works were not shown in the historical exhibition at the JINR Scientists' Club, but the curators considered them essential for the display: the Firing Squad painting of 1967, shown publicly for the first time, as well as the crucial Rhythmed Memory work based on the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle with seven crew members on board. In the latter, the images of the characters are reduced to abstract lines-spots: the artist shows the moment of the literal disappearance, dissolution of the human image, but at the same time its transformation into an expressive sublime symbolic structure, in which the shell of the ship is indicated by a triangle.

PROCESS AS OBJECT

Pankin repeatedly emphasised in his interviews that discovering the avant-garde had a decisive influence on him as an artist during his studies at the Moscow Architectural Institute. In the 1960s, students had access to information about the early 20th century avant-garde in both architecture and the visual arts. The young artist was strongly influenced by international exhibitions of contemporary art as well as by an introduction to the radical aesthetics of the avant-garde, in particular, figures such as Yakov Chernikhov.

Subsequently, Pankin worked in the Experimental Design Workshop of the Spetsproektrestavratsiya company, where he developed original methods for restoring monuments of ancient Russian architecture in Veliky Novgorod and Old Ryazan. It was the analysis of the proportional structure of temples and their spatial embodiment that led Pankin an understanding of the unconditional harmonic laws of art. He later applied this knowledge to the study of the construction patterns of Malevich’s suprematist works and in the spatial embodiment of numeric structures.

Decimal Numeral System in Three-Dimensional Space is the result of reflections on the geometric representation of numbers from the natural number sequence and the decimal number system, demonstrating a step-by-step movement from a one-dimensional linear structure to a three-dimensional one.

Black Square Existing in Three-Dimensional Space is dedicated to the dualism of Malevich’s canonical work, "capturing" the transition of a black square from a plane to an object. Pankin notes that "in this case, its binary structure breaks down into two parts – the simplest geometric shapes. One of the variants of the "breaking down" are black and white triangular pyramids.

The exhibition is crowned by the Pendulum Motion of Red Square kinetic object — a replica of Pankin’s own work in the collection of the Russian Museum. The author calculated the motion so that the lower red square of Malevich’s painting "rotates" around the black square — the "sun".