Triumph Gallery presents a joint project by Maria Safronova and Anton Kuznetsov, Bee Zone. The exhibition includes paintings, graphic works, and installations, many of which will be presented for the first time. There are around twenty thousand species of bees in the world, yet many of them have nearly disappeared in recent decades. Their extinction poses irreversible consequences — from the loss of roughly one third of food products and a vast number of medicines to the severe depletion of flora due to the lack of pollination.

In Bee Zone, the structure of bee life is examined as a metaphor for contemporary society: human cultural and social models reveal direct parallels with the world of these insects. The project also looks toward the near future, imagining dystopian scenarios shaped by irreversible environmental changes. These themes intertwine in the works of Maria Safronova and Anton Kuznetsov, reflecting different aspects of the interaction between bees and humans — delicate connections, boundaries of contact, and mutual dependence.

Maria Safronova is known for her paintings devoted to social institutions that shape human life: kindergarten, school, hospital, and the workplace. Her Hive series reveals numerous parallels between human and bee communities, with similarities emerging across various structures — from domestic environments to social systems. The relationship between humans and nature, between humans and other species, as well as interactions among people themselves, comes to the forefront.

In his Refugium series, Anton Kuznetsov addresses the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. In attempting to solve problems through various devices, humans effectively prosthetically augment the natural environment, yet technology often generates new difficulties. In Kuznetsov’s paintings and installations, a hypothetical future is depicted in which people are forced to replace bees with mechanisms: drones fly over melting glaciers, natural hives are replaced by industrial facilities, and fields are transformed into artificial systems for cultivating plants.

Maria Safronova was born in Rzhev in 1979. She graduated from the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems and the Free Workshops School of Contemporary Art. She was a finalist of the Kandinsky Prize in 2012 and a nominee in 2014, 2017, and 2021. She was also nominated for the Innovation Prize in 2021 and received the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize for Best Visual Artwork in 2015. She was a nominee for the Moscow Art Prize 2020 and NordArt 2021 (Germany). Her works are held in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art (St. Petersburg), the Khazine National Art Gallery (Kazan), the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, the World Ocean Museum Center "Square of Peace" (Kaliningrad), the Russian Center for Art (Kaliningrad), the National Museum of Women and Children (Beijing), as well as in major corporate collections and private collections in Russia and abroad.

Anton Kuznetsov was born in 1973 in Kazan. He graduated from the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems, and the Free Workshops. He participated in the MuseumsQuartier 21 residency in Vienna (2014) and was nominated for the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize in 2015. He was also nominated for the Moscow Art Prize 2020. His works are held in the collections of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Khazine National Art Gallery (Kazan), the World Ocean Museum Center "Square of Peace" (Kaliningrad), the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad.

Curator: Marina Bobyleva