Exhibitions

Venue: Tatiana Nikitina Art-Holding

Time: January 25 - March 15

Year: 2008

The exhibition “Really the same Tatyana? ..” is dedicated to the female image in the works of contemporary artists.

What kind of woman is she today, and how do artists see her at the beginning of the third millennium? Women's destinies and stories have always excited and inspired poets and painters. And I really want to see in the works of our contemporaries a romantic image of the best and most beautiful, surprising and exalting, inspiring and blessing woman - a woman of all time!

The exhibition featured the works of Felix Volosenkov, Vladimir Zagorov, Anatoly Zaslavsky, Aron Zinshtein, Valery Lucca.

Zinaida Arsenyeva “Femininity - Eternal and Fatal”
Women's theme is now in demand by museum curators and gallery owners around the world. She is in fashion. Her interpretations are different.

The idea of ​​the exhibition, invented by the curator Irina Bolotova and named by Pushkin’s line “Is this Tatyana really? ..”, to show the reflection of a modern woman in modern painting. Understand what the ideal of female beauty is today, is there a place for romance in the work of artists who appeal to the female image?

If any modernist director had decided to stage a film today based on the novel by A. S. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”, the famous scene of Tatyana’s letter would have looked a little different.
The girl would pour out her feelings not with paper illuminated with a quivering, lively and mysterious flickering of a candle, but with a computer monitor emitting a whitish demonic light.
But at the same time, Tatyana would also suffer and suffer, picking up those only necessary words that could tell about love, and would tremble in fear of being misunderstood, rejected ...

The era of innocence is long over. The modern woman has learned to survive in this tough, masculine world. She is free and independent, able to fend for herself, but under this armor sometimes hides a tender and quivering soul, longing for love.

Artists subtly feel this flickering duality of the modern female image: tenderness and aggressiveness.
If some artists are attracted by eternal feminine, then others are more interested in the type of fatal and even fallen women who can destroy the life of a loving man and destroy him.
It is curious how, depending on the interpretation of the female image, the plastic language, the pictorial basis itself, also changes.

Nowadays, beauty often becomes the accessory of glossy magazines and advertising aesthetics. But the romantic ideal of beauty, embodied in the works of Vladimir Babunts, Laura Malysheva, Mstislav Pavlov, Nikolai Reznichenko, has nothing to do with varnished, vulgar prettiness.

The woman depicted in the portrait of Vladimir Babunts recalls the classic story “Venus in front of a mirror”. She seemed to allow herself to admire herself, as well as the white flowers in a vase, undoubtedly presented to her as a sign of admiration.

In the female image of Laura Malysheva, the echoes of the Middle Ages are heard with his beautiful ladies and chivalrous love. The talking detail is a vase of fruit as a symbol of fertility, the fullness of life and its eternal renewal.

Reznichenko has a beautiful woman in a white dress in one hand holding a small man in a tailcoat, in the other - a key. Woman's eyes are closed. What is this - a hint that love is blind and often deprives a person of his will, turning into a puppet? Or is a woman herself a fate that plays with people and even gods?

Anatoly Zaslavsky is one of those artists who remains faithful to the actual painting, keeps traditions, craftsmanship. His city landscapes are always humanized, inspired. He even has heaven can talk with houses crowding somewhere on Petrograd. The yellow tent, the red wagon and the same bright coat of a woman wandering along the street do not just revive the St. Petersburg landscape, which, as usual, is sustained in brownish-gray tones. They instill in the viewer that causeless joy that visits people only on sunny days or when they are in love.
His female images, regardless of the surroundings and costume, are not tied to a specific time. Through the feminine faces as if shine through the features of their ancestors. We are all connected with each other, in the present always looks past ...

In the paintings of Vladimir Zagorov, color reigns, which has a leading role in creating the image. In "Woman with a Guitar" everything is built on a fantastically beautiful combination of lemon yellow with a tint in greenish (some kind of sweet and sour shade) with overflows of blue and blue. The picture seems to be flooded with moonlight, but this is not quite the usual moon for us - pale green. A woman with her head bowed over a guitar is not beautiful. But it is mysterious, passionate and gentle, like a southern night.

Aron Zinshtein is an artist of powerful temperament; his work is associated with the tradition of expressionism. It is as if he is not keeping up with his brush, which, trembling and vibrating with impatience, is trying to grab the fast-flowing time by the tail.
At this exhibition, Aron Zinshtein presents several works, but his Cyclist is most interesting for revealing a given topic. Dressed in a bathing suit and white socks, the girl is depicted in profile. White-pink skin on a bluish-green shimmering background seems even more delicate, cast with mother-of-pearl.

Galina Korostik is an artist belonging to a completely different tradition. Sophisticated, refined, even some aesthetic works made in complex mixed media refer to the schedule of the beginning of the XX century. She is not attracted to the images of the townsfolk. She draws creative energy from sources that are not accessible to everyone, be it silent films, Chinese poetry or the Silver Age. Adorable girl in a small hat and sailor suit, with a tennis racket in her hands, is sad about something on the beach. The mother-of-pearl shell is a reminder of the Botticellian Birth of Venus. The image of the girl resurrects in memory the masterpiece of Lukino Visconti “Death in Venice” and the insidious smile of Tajio, in whose face the innocence and sophistication strangely mixed. "Tennis player" Korostik - from another time, today there are no such girls. Its refined, luminous, as if made of silver, charm explains why art and fashion are so often turned into the past, not noticing the present.

Felix Volosenkov in decorative still lifes managed to express the ideal of beauty of our time. Against a green background, there are large tulips, some kind of aggressive in brightness, whose color resembles the famous “shocking pink”, styled in the thirties of the last century by Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated a lot with Dali. Pink and green, the color combination is unthinkable during the time of Chekhov, which was considered vulgar, disharmonious, today recognized as spectacular and fashionable.

Many painters were notable for their close attention to ladies' outfits and jewelry. Konstantin Somov, working in 1916 on the portrait of E. Nosova, notes in a letter that the model poses in a dress from Lamanova and gives a detailed description of him.

Fashion designers, in turn, were often inspired by painting. The work of Tatyana Parfyonova, who has long been friends with painting, is becoming one of the semantic centers of the exposition. The evening dress depicted by her, as if she had not yet had time to cool down after a hot body full of life and desires, is a peculiar female portrait. Clothes that are in close contact with a person seem to absorb and retain a particle of his soul, energy. Marcel Proust called the dresses "alive", saw in them disinterestedness, thoughtfulness, secrecy, some secret intentions, the memory of healing or love ...

But this, as often happens with clothes, is also a portrait of the era. Konstantin Troitsky’s painting “Poet, Muse and Cat” evokes some kind of painful feeling. On the canvas is an idyll. A man in a shirt with a romantic frill and a modest woman in an apron hold hands, touchingly touching each other. And at their feet a cat curls, the keeper of the hearth. He is a poet who lives in a fantasy world, she is a devoted wife to him, who devoted her life to serving her beloved. Perhaps this is a dream of happiness, beautiful and unattainable. The artist’s wife is hard work requiring sacrifice. Today, in the age of the triumph of feminism, there are not so many women who are ready for such a feat - to be the wife of the artist.

Plato divided love into earthly and heavenly, carnal and ideal. In the works of contemporary artists, one can find both the light, divine reflection of Aphrodite Uranos (high, ideal love), and the infernal-red flashes of Aphrodite Pandemos (low, carnal, venal love).

In Aleksey Stern's painting “On the Market”, meat carcasses and pork heads, reminiscent of the baroque abundance of Sneijders still lifes, symbolize the power of the flesh, rude earthly joys. However, a meat saleswoman clutching a knife in her hands does not look like a rough merchant. She seems infinitely feminine, soft, a little sad, as if dreaming of love - sublime, ideal.

Felix Volosenkov in “Shining Woman” created the image of a blonde, a sort of Barbie of the post-Soviet era, “material girl”. The main thing in this naked, middle-aged beauty is not even a body very far from perfect, and her hair is golden yellow, curled, magnificent. The artist makes them embossed, they seem to erupt from the two-dimensional plane of the picture to us - in the third dimension.

What is beauty? There is nothing more subjective, changeable, dependent on the fashion of the time and style of the era. But always in the bottom line - that which is imperishable, the very essence of femininity is eternal, fatal ...

Zinaida Arsenieva
Exhibition catalog: http://artholtn.ru/files/Maket.pdf