The ocean-liner silhouettes of Saint Petersburg’s prefabricated blocks of flats, with their narrow balconies and concrete entranceways — reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City on the Nevsky’s vast expanses — are replete with a sense of utopia, and combine the ideal and trivial. The urban centre in Toronto, where the artist has been living since 1991, has elicited similar associations for Dmitry Gretsky. The artist is a "collector" of fragments of space, the texture of the city — advertising signboards, power poles, people’s hands and backs. They are magnified many times over in his works, rendering even small objects monumental.

 

Dmitry Gretsky: "When creating the Habitat series, I was contemplating how time leaves an impression and comes to a standstill, overwhelming us at the very moment of our existence. It presses down on us with particular force at a time of global upheaval in our lives. At such moments the identification and alienation of the artist and surrounding environment occurs. This is precisely when I tried to deliberately cast aside cold analysis, absorbing instead the atmosphere of the new space."