After recently implementing a series of major public art projects, Dmitri Aske returns to the gallery space with his new studio works. One of them, ‘A Moment Before The Dawn’, in which the author tries to capture the spirit of the times, lent its name to the exhibition as a whole and outlined the central motif of the project – the world frozen on the eve of impending changes.

At a time when the tension and drama of what happens around us is inevitably increasing, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain an inner balance and prevent our lives from falling apart under duress from external factors. The bright palette and memorable style of the artist’s work do not obscure his profound and serious message: amid the bustle and instability of modern life the artists encourages us to focus on what is important: awareness, tranquillity and love. Using his own mythology based on the primary cultural and social archetypes, Dmitri Aske reassembles the puzzle of reality and shows us the main vectors and prospects for development.

All the works presented at the exhibition were constructed using the author’s technique of mosaic plywood reliefs. For each item hundreds of fragments were laser-cut and then hand-coloured with spray paint to form a multi-layered mosaic based on preliminary sketches and drawings. With each new major project Dmitri Aske’s works noticeably evolve, the compositions and subject matter become more complex due to the content, elaboration of detail and selection of new colours. The author’s technique, which involves painstaking manual work, becomes a tool to convey the artist’s views. Aske calls on us to halt our headlong rush for a while, stop living with other people’s imposed ideas and find an answer to the question of what it means to be a modern-day human.