"Breakfast with Kirusha" at the EM restaurant

The EM restaurant and the MYTH gallery both begin with a similar gesture of attentiveness to place: both spaces exist within old St. Petersburg apartments. This foundation of exposed historical layers, intimacy, and working within an already established environment unites them and makes the exhibition “Breakfast with Kirusha” a natural extension of both practices.

EM works with seasonal sets—they change every three months, year after year—while the underlying approach remains constant. In the work of Petr Kirusha, a similar principle can be traced: the artist works in series, each time focusing on a particular motif or form. The exhibition features eight pieces from two series. In one, a world with a slightly skewed logic emerges: perspective is disrupted, unexpected angles are used alongside stark contrasts of scale, and spherical motifs recur. In the other, the artist’s attention is fixed on the everyday and on personal observation, where the diamond shape structures the composition and becomes a gap in the fabric of the mundane.

The restaurant’s interior preserves the feel of a lived-in space with a history: exposed walls, heterogeneous objects, and a kitchen with a perpetually lit AGA stove set a slow, composed rhythm. Kirusha’s works integrate seamlessly—where pauses, repetitions, and subtle details that usually go unnoticed are equally essential. Even the diamonds—essentially voids between forms—find their echo in the layout of EM: in the spaces between tables, in the kitchen’s suspended movement, in the cadence of changing dishes. This shared focus on the everyday and on paying attention to it defines the very idea of “Breakfast with Kirusha”—an invitation, as it were, to take one’s time and simply spend a morning (or any other part of the day) at a tranquil pace.