Art, inauguration in Rome of the monument to the writer Kirghiso Ajtmatov

The work, entitled ‘Monte Ajtmatov’, was commissioned by the Kirghiso government and created thanks to the collaboration of the Municipality of Rome, which made available the green area in which it will be placed. The event intends to commemorate the meeting, which took place in Rome last October 2024, between the Italian premier Giorgia Meloni and President Kirghiso Sadir Japarov, as part of an agreement to strengthen diplomatic and cultural relations between the two republics.

Morosov made the monument over two years based on archive materials and on the personal memories of the meetings with the great writer. The artist selected a block of pure statuary marble in the Carrara quarries and one of Roman travertine in the caves of Tivoli, both materials that belong to the Roman monumental tradition. Ajtmatov’s face is portrayed in marble, where he appears young and concentrated, obtained thanks to a plastic solution that combines the Roman sculptural tradition with compositional elements of deconstructivism and is grafted on a travertine obelisk, an architectural figure that dominates the squares of the Italian capital.

Plastic solutions inspired by deconstructivism have the main function of alluding to the snow -covered mountains Kirghise so loved by the writer, who considered the relationship between man and nature crucial. The origin of the title ‘Monte Ajtmatov’ connects to the Kirghisa tradition to give each mountain their own name, which celebrates a character, an event, a significant opportunity in the history of the country. Alexey Morosov was born in Biškek, Kyrgyzstan (ex Fruze) in 1974, has lived and worked in Italy since 2015. Sculptor, painter and architect, his works include in the collections of very important institutions, including the Russian State Museum, the Sefirot Foundation, the Lucca Banca del Monte Foundation, the Museum of the New Academy of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg, as well as in significant private collections, international.

In 1991 he began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture of the State Polycine Institute of Kyrgyzstan. In 1993 he was admitted to the Department of Sculpture of the Moscow Academic Art Institute of Art “VI Surikov”, where he studied in Leo Kerbel’s shop. In 1999 he obtained his diploma with the Ultima Ratio statue. His artistic career began in the early nineties. In 1992 he was the winner of the II Biennale of Contemporary Art of St. Petersburg, where he received one of the great prizes at stake. In 1999 he settled in Provence, where he studied the French sculpture of the XVI-XVIII centuries and works with terracotta. In 2011-2012, at the Marble Palace of the Russian State Museum, his first great personal exhibition was held, entitled Anthology. Since 2015 he has lived and works permanently in Italy, in Lucca.

In 2016 he exhibited the Pontifex Maximus project at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, in which the relationship between antiquity and modernity and the cultural connections between East and West explode. This is the first act of a monumental trilogy, which intends to connote architectural and/or urban planning contexts of great and recognized historical-artistic identity with the plastic power of its sculptures. In 2024 he presented to Pisa Exodus, the second part of his exhibition trilogy, with which he continued the research on possible interactions between classical legacy and contemporary art. The exhibition scattered his works in the main squares of the ancient city.