The Gallery Romain Larivière is pleased to announce the first solo show in France of the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein (Moscow, 1966).

In 1987 Pepperstein forms the group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics (MH) together with Sergei Anufriev of Joud Leiderman. MH is a fictional author, a fictional name to which the activities of the individual members are ascribed Such flexibility allows the group to recruit new adepts and to preserv its identity when other members of the group drop out. Their preoccupations emerge from the opening up of post Stalinist Russian society and an unofficial Russian culture, just beginning to emerge from its longstanding social isolation.

Russian artists are now faced with the question of how to deal with an omnipresent western commercial mass culture. If some preach separation, and others start adopting images and myths of western mass culture, Pepperstein's strategy derives not only from citing external forms of mass culture (i.e. pictures and words), but more important, their inner mechanisms and agendas.

In this situation of unprecedented openess. which fascinated and seduced so many other Russian artists, the members of MH take a different tack of renewed isolation from the outside world through leaving common language and entering terminology. Their goal is to mark difference, to avoid being immersed in the mire of public talk, and to maintain linguistic distance as the only means of assuming a critical position. The correlation between pictures and words is the dominant theme in the artistic practice of the group.

An understanding of Pepperstein's individual works is intimately bound up with a knowledge of the discourse and the highly complex group mythology propagated by the MH. However, on attempting to acquire such knowledge, we find that MH refers us to other words arid pictures. This endless chain of referral proves to be the group strategy. The artistic agenda of Pepperstein and MH basically consists of artificially creating a self~contained subculture. Its curious vocabulary of terms, references, and designations, whose meaning is often known only to initiates, is interestingly enough, especially convincing and effective to outsiders.

Pepperstein's black and white drawings made with Indian ink generate an astonishingly compact and mystically charged atmosphere. He denies the apparent virtuosity of his technique by a mirror effect creating a complex game between the figures made with his right hand, and the ones created with his unskilled left hand.

Pevel Peperstein lives and works in Moscou and Tel Aviv. His work was recently shown in Solitude au Musée at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Saint Etienne. He will be soon presented in Malmô. Sw, at the Bienale of Valencia, SP and at the Kunsthaus of Zug. CH together with Ilya Kabakov and Boris Grojs.