“The protest against mortality, the hunger for immortality and resurrection, bestowed an initial impulse to human creativity. [Nikolai] Fedorov remarks that it was out of a feeling of loss, out of protest against death that the first artistic monuments appeared. They were intended to recreate the image of the deceased through painting or sculpture, to restore his or her likeness at least as a representation.

Among the diverse, always aphoristic and figurative definitions that Fedorov gives to art, there is the following: art as “a countermeasure against the Fall.” Fedorov illustrates this definition with the example of architecture. Its creations are extended vertically, visibly demonstrating defiance of the law of gravity. This law embodies for Fedorov the force of nature’s necessity, which leads all organic and inorganic bodies towards decay, sin, and death. Architecture gathers and artistically organizes natural matter and creates out of it a new, perfect, and harmonious world. Architectural space is ruled by different laws—the laws developed and applied by humankind itself.”

- Gacheva, Anastasia. “Art as the Overcoming of Death: From Nikolai Fedorov to the Cosmists of the 1920s”, e-flux , March 2018.

OCULUS

Curated by Sam Smith and Jake Hasapopoulos

LOMEX
89 WALKER ST 
NYC

June 28 - August 2, 2025

Banks Violette
Stan Buglass
Charlotte Seux
Phoebe Nesgos
David Linchen
Jake Hasapopoulos

https://www.lomex.gallery/exhibitions/oculus