'In Dante Veritas' by Vasily Klyukin

The main part of ‘Art Panorama INFERNO’ is a world known sculpture exhibition ‘In Dante Veritas’ by Vasily Klyukin which moved to Lucerne right after the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019.

For the first time, the collection was shown in 2018 in Saint-Petersburg at The State Russian Museum, becoming the most attended art show of the city of the summer.

So far, approximately 500,000 people have visited the In ‘Dante Veritas’ in different parts of the world and It earned an unprecedented response from the visitors with thousands of grateful reviews. One of the reasons visitors enjoy the exhibition so much is the so-called immersive experience, which is provided by the poetry audio guide, supplied in 11 languages. The art object itself leaves absolutely no one indifferent.

A reverberation of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy, Vasily Klyukin explores themes of human vice and sin, Good and Evil, and reimagines Dante’s Inferno as an environmental collapse—the final consequence for our sin and non-action.

Blurring the boundary between figuration and modern abstraction, the collection represents a narrative that re-engineers the 9 circles of hell. 21 sculptures depict human sins like Anger, Hypocrite, Gluttony and Betrayal. The 3.5-meter tall 4 Horsemen of Apocalypse are known by their new names—Overpopulation, Misinformation, Extermitation and Pollution—and raise important global issues, ushering classical tropes into the modern era.

As renowned art critic Donald Kuspit highlights: “Klyukin’s Dante Veritas is avant-garde entertainment that addresses a pressing public concern: the possible — inevitable? — extinction of the human species.”

In Lucerne the exposition has been supplemented with 2 art objects. One is a Prison, where the most famous villains of the world are permanently locked. This object continues to raise the topic of human sins. Here one can find Lenin, author of the Red Terror, Stalin, perpetrator of numerous repressions, Pablo Escobar who inundated America with cocaine, Bokassa-the cannibal, and others.

In the center of exhibition is the second added art object— The Heart of Hope, a breathtaking statue depiction of a great heart. Klyukin intends this to symbolize the fact that that we can still change everything, stop Death and Pollution. This is the symbol of Hope for the future.