Intermission Automatic translate

From December 9 to December 21, 2023, the exhibition of Konstantin Polyakov “Intermission” will be held in the halls of the Creative Union of Artists (Nevsky Prospekt, 60). The exhibition in four exhibition halls will present the most striking works of the main directions, methods and stages of the artist’s work from the early period to the projects of recent years.

At the same time, the entire exhibition is a bold artistic exploration of complex themes: the search for oneself and a new expressive language, emptiness and anxiety through portraits, graphic sheets with nudes and landscapes with a special subtle coloring.

The landscape hall will house plein air works familiar to artists. Konstantin Polyakov’s landscape is not just a recording of the end point of a travel route, but an artistic exploration of personal experience. The artist, starting from the achievements of the impressionists, moves to where the landscape becomes a field for the author’s statement. Emptiness is another important theme in the works of Konstantin Polyakov, which is resolved through nudity. Graphic nude sheets are practices where nudity is no longer the main subject. Now this is an allegory of finding a place in the proposed reality. Nudity turns not just into the absence of covers, but into emptiness, which even more acutely demonstrates the loneliness of the figures on the canvas.

The work of Konstantin Polyakov is a continuous experiment with the stated plot, with material, texture and technique. The main theme of recent years is working with the additional element according to Malevich, which is used as a medical bandage. On the canvases, this plastic component has turned into a special substance, with its lightness and transparency referring to the image of reasoning, thought, and spirit. The trembling of scraps of foreign tissue on the canvas is the idea of ​​memory not only of the body, but also of the soul. The viewer sees how, through pain and suffering, the artist finds the path to peace, to recovery, to the idea of ​​​​a new multi-layered painting - both in the literal sense and through a personal rethinking of the space and format of the canvas.

Polyakov builds a kind of light and shadow dramaturgy, thereby confirming the opinion of N. N. Punin: “The nature of the surface in a modern picture is even greater than its content.” Konstantin Polyakov (1973) - member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia. Since 2001 he has lived and worked in St. Petersburg. His works are in the collections of the State Museum “Tsarskoye Selo Collection” (Pushkin), the St. Petersburg Museum of Contemporary Art Erarta, the Essentuki Museum of Local Lore. Shpakovsky, the Hermitage-Vyborg Exhibition Center, the State Museum of Artistic Culture of the Novgorod Land, the Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Karelia, the Arkhangelsk Museum of Fine Arts, the Murmansk Regional Art Museum, the Pskov Museum-Reserve, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad.