SAINT-PETERSBURG.- The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO presents the exhibition Cosmos by Mikhail Rozanov, one of the most influential Moscow-based modern pictorial photographers.

The art project Cosmos has stared up during Rozanov’s journeys to Mongolia, Antarctica and Northern Atlantic. The large format black-and-white pictures depict majestic endless spaces of deserts, oceans, ice fields and icebergs. The artworks are represented in three series, each featuring a symmetrical diptych – an original photograph and its identical copy, printed in inversed manner. There is no symmetry in nature, and thus, such a technique is the artist’s way to create a piece of ultra-ordered space of his own.

Black and white analog picture is Mikhail Rozanov’s favourite medium of photography. He is known for his minimalist style, clarity and austerity of compositions. In such a manner the photographer does his best to show various states and conditions: stillness and motion, consistency and evanescence, transience and infinity.

The central theme of Rozanov’s oeuvre is a man’s search for himself and his interrelation with space and cosmos. The term “cosmos” has come from a classic philosophy and refers to a complex and orderly system, such as Universe, which is the opposite of Chaos.

Mikhail Rozanov was born in Moscow in 1973. In 1990 he entered the Moscow State University (the Faculty of History), then continued his education at the New Academy of Fine Arts founded by the celebrated artist Timur Novikov. Rozanov began studying photography at the age of 21. Few years later he became an active participant of numerous national and foreign exhibitions. Nowadays the works by Mikhail Rozanov are kept in many museum and private collections including the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the State Russian Museum, the Moscow House of Photography, the Museum of the New Academy of Fine Arts, the Shchusev Museum of Architecture and the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO. Since 2010 Rozanov has been lecturing at the Photography Faculty of the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow.