The exhibition Metaphysics and Despair presents the recent works of Viktor Pivovarov (1937), complemented by an album he created in 2005. All of the works are being shown at DOX for the first time. The exhibition is introduced by the album To the Philosopher, Letter No. 3, for which Pivovarov used a booklet created by Daniil Kharms in 1937 (incidentally, the same year the artist himself was born) and reworked it into the specific art form of an album. As was typical of Kharms, the booklet combines absurd humour with serious themes. It deals with what happens to a person if they give in to their basest instincts. A large number of the exhibited paintings are from the series Poets and Muses, which corresponds to a period when Pivovarov was actually surrounded by muses and wrote a set of poems. This somewhat autobiographical cycle presents various forms and paths of inspiration and depicts all the possible hardships and joys associated with the creation of a work of art, be it literary or visual. With insight and specific humour, it shows how complex the birth of these uplifting metaphysical works is and what kind of mental and physical anguish it involves. At the end of the exhibition we return in an arc to Daniil Kharms. The series Metaphysics and Despair, from which the entire exhibition gets its title, once again portrays what happens when our basest instincts such as greed, hatred, and anger take over – it can even lead to war. The paintings include real newspaper articles chronicling the horrors of the war in Ukraine. It’s as if the metaphysical images are unrelated to the texts, begging the question of whether it is even possible to write poems or paint pictures against the backdrop of these horrific events. Datum und Uhrzeit Opening hours Tue—Sun 11:00—19:00