Alexander Labas. Unknown portraits Automatic translate

Exhibition “Alexander. Labas. Unknown Portraits” begins its journey through Russian cities. First in line after the capital is the city of Pushchino, Moscow Region. Here, in the House of Scientists, the oldest cultural center of the city, the exhibition project will be held from March 2 to March 31, 2024. The exhibition was organized by the Alexander Labas and Raisa Idelson Foundation, founded by the master’s daughter-in-law Raimonda Labas (the author of the project idea) and his granddaughter, Alisa Labas, who together with art critic Nailya Rustaeva co-curated the exhibition. For many years, the Foundation has been systematizing, restoring and carefully storing the artist’s works.

This exhibition was first shown in 2023 at the Moscow Pyotr Fomenko Workshop Theater. During the course of the project, while researching a number of “portraits of unknowns,” several discoveries were made, the results of which will also be presented at the exhibition in the form of extended texts about the characters depicted.

The project explores a little-known facet of the work of the Russian painter Alexander Labas (1900-1983), a singer of speed and movement of the turbulent 20th century, of whom he was the same age. The viewer will be able to either discover the artist, or reconsider his attitude towards his work, immerse himself in the study of his interests in painting that are not obvious at first glance, and rethink his creative path.

It is no coincidence that the first stop on the Russian tour was the city of Pushchino, one of the scientific centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located on the banks of the Oka. In the scientific community, by the way, the city is known primarily as the Pushchino Biological Research Center. An interesting fact: Alexander Labas’s interests included biology, physics, and philosophy; he sought to unravel the inner essence of things. The desire to engage in science was embodied in his life by the artist’s son, Julius Labas (1933-2008), a talented scientist who anticipated discoveries in the field of experimental biology, a brilliant experimenter and theorist, who became a legendary figure for Pushchino, as well as for all world science. It was here that from the 1960s to the 1990s, Yuliy Alexandrovich often came for work, alone or with his family. A portrait of Julius Labas by his father adorns one of the key sections of the exhibition, dedicated to “physicists and lyricists.”

Alisa Labas: “Thanks to places like Pushchino, we remain young. It wasn’t just a time of growing up for me. These are youth, like-minded people, scientists and simply curious and educated people around. In such places, it’s not just about holding exhibitions, but simply being in them is very pleasant. Indeed, there are places of power in life that you sometimes turn to even involuntarily. For our family, this is Pushchino.”

The attention of Labas the portrait painter included actors and translators, painters and graphic artists, famous theater directors and great musicians, physicists and writers, film experts, architects, friends and members of their families and, of course, his family, his closest circle - his wife, son and granddaughter. All of them are real witnesses of a complex and ambiguous time. All presented works can be divided into “physicists” and “lyricists” - in the spirit of the debate that excited the imagination of Labas’ contemporaries. Physicists, of course, include Albert Einstein (there will be three portraits of him at the exhibition), whom the artist did not know personally, but sincerely admired.

Nailya Rustaeva: “Unknown portraits of people of the last century performed by Alexander Labas are a significant page in the artist’s creative biography, which not only once again proves the versatility and scale of the painter’s talent, but also reveals him as an attentive psychologist, a sensitive interlocutor and a person extremely passionate about modern life "

The energy of the century will be compressed for each visitor in the gallery of faces, subtly and lyrically conveyed by the artist in some cases, and energetically and quite sharply in others. And everyone will pay attention to the fact that in Labas’s portraits the attributes of Soviet reality are practically excluded, which is why they are still perceived in a modern way today.