"New Nikonov" Automatic translate

The exhibition, organized by the GROSart Gallery in conjunction with the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin, presents more than sixty graphic and pictorial works by the oldest Moscow artist Pavel Fedorovich Nikonov, performed in recent years and practically unknown to both the general public and professionals.

The leading role of the Moscow artist Pavel Fedorovich Nikonov in the domestic art of the second half of the twentieth century and the 21st century, which has actively entered into its own rights, is beyond doubt today. Being a living legend of the Russian art scene for a long time, Pavel Nikonov powerfully declared himself back in the early 1960s, becoming one of the luminaries of the “severe style” along with Viktor Popkov, Nikolai Andronov, Tair Salakhov and other young artists then. The large-scale figures of the heroes of his paintings, clearly outlined with a confident decisive brush, arose as a result of bold travels to various regions of Siberia, where it was possible to closely join in heavy taiga life.

But soon, moving away from the modernized pictorial fixation of harsh working days and revolutionary scenes fanned with romantic heroics, Nikonov from the beginning of the 1970s was completely captured by the impressions of the life of the remote Volga villages and towns (Aleksino, Kalyazin, Volkovoynya), where since then he regularly and to be for a long time. The new nature, where the central place was first occupied by a living and relatively prosperous, and then dying Russian village with its land, sky, man, his work and leisure, made, according to art critic Dmitry Sarabyanov, a special “Nikon universe”, “great, but terrible”. By the beginning of the 1990s, as Olga Musakova, curator of the exhibitions of the Russian Museum correctly noted, “the long and painful period of searches ended with the birth of the“ new ”Nikonov.”

Sensitively captured in reality, the eternal drama of the relationship between man and nature, the destiny of which is to plow the land, contributed to a noticeable renewal of the artist’s pictorial and graphic style, which was steadily gaining an emancipated expressive glow of a formal language and a deep, sometimes tragically sounding philosophical subtext. The very element of peasant life, with its troubles and holidays, as if “screams” in the restless and powerful energy paintings of the master by martial arts of struggling figures and spaces, breaks and tilts of buildings, flashes and showers of heaven. Sometimes the almost semi-abstract plastic of his compositions amazes with the enviable intensity of the dialogue with nature reflected in them, which, perhaps, even intensifies in the works of recent years shown at the exhibition. And therefore, before us in its entirety, a phenomenon arises that is full of creative passion and devoid of the slightest creative laziness of the artist, invariably appearing as the “New Nikonov”.

Curators: Elena Gribonosova-Grebneva, Elena Osotina.