Thanksgiving exhibition at the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts Automatic translate

KALUGA. April 30 at 16.00 in the exhibition hall of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts (at the address: Lenin St., 103) opens the exhibition "Thanksgiving" of works by contemporary Russian artists Alexander Smirnov (sculpture), Yuri Popkov (painting), Alexander Tikhomirov (window painting). Artists - like-minded people, geographically separated (from Moscow to Blagoveshchensk), are connected by a commonality of goals aimed at finding spiritual sources and addressing the foundations of Russian national culture.

The exposition space of the exhibition includes more than 50 works - sculptural portraits and multi-figure compositions, plastic of small monumental forms, works performed in the framework of the modern direction of religious painting, decorative paintings and thoughts.

The sculptural works of Alexander Smirnov (born 1949) are distinguished by an amazing sense of harmony and quiet joy of human life.

“Sculpture is an icon for a street that can stand in the open air” - this is how the author himself comprehends the main idea of ​​his work. The plasticity of his works is associated with the traditions of folk art and the cultural features of Orthodoxy. Based on ancient Russian sculpture, Alexander Smirnov uses a variety of materials in his work: stone, bronze, wood, combining them into ontologically meaningful artistic images. The philosophy of his creative path is revealed in the plastic embodiment of the figures of Russian saints and ascetics, in the works of the biblical cycle, in parables, images of death and rebirth, punishment and repentance, good and evil, in sculptural images of people seeking the path to God, to righteousness and spiritual cleansing.

A. Smirnov’s creative career is connected with the Kaluga land - the artist created a sculptural portrait of the great Russian writer N.V. Gogol, which he presented to the Kaluga Regional Art Museum. In autumn 2014, a monument to N.V. Gogol A. Smirnov will be installed in the urban environment of Kaluga on the model of the donated model.

The works of the Moscow painter Yuri Popkov (born in 1954) attract with their lyricism and deep penetration to the very focus of the human soul. Having started his career early under the guidance of his uncle, the famous Soviet artist Viktor Popkov, he paints landscapes, still lifes, paints himself with light self-irony, people close to him with reverent tenderness. The artist is attracted by the primitive with its decorativeness and figurative power, with its sincerity and laconicism of expressive means.

For the first time in the halls of the museum, “window painting” is presented - the modern direction of religious painting, whose roots go back to ancient Russian icon painting. These are the works of the Annunciation artist Alexander Tikhomirov (born in 1956), who in 1995 patented this type of painting, and today is the only master in the world who works in it. The artist uses for his works obsolete shutters from the windows of houses from abandoned Amur villages, which accumulated the energy of the people living in these houses. On them the artist’s inquisitive gaze reveals the divine principle - the faces of Christ, the Virgin, the martyrs of Holy Russia. Painting is art and philosophy at the same time. The works of A. Tikhomirov do not leave indifferent, it is not by chance that they were exhibited at many prestigious exhibition venues in our country and abroad.

Thanksgiving is not an exhibition for an unambiguous and final perception. Its space pushes the viewer to philosophical and spiritual comprehension of artistically meaningful eternal themes of human existence.

The exhibition will run from April 30 to May 25, 2014 at the address: st. Lenin, d.103.