Friends/Strangers 18+ Automatic translate

The tenth anniversary year for ARTSTORY opens with an exhibition of works from the gallery’s collection – “Ours/Aliens”. The project not only demonstrates part of the extensive collection, but draws the viewer’s attention to prominent representatives of late Soviet unofficial art.

The name of the exhibition was not chosen by chance. It unites four authors - Dmitry Ikonnikov, Natalya Nesterova, Lev Tabenkin and Vasily Shulzhenko. So stylistically different; united by an academic school and an equally distant attitude to the mainstream of their time; not friends and, of course, not opponents; colleagues and contemporaries.

All the authors of the works presented at the exhibition clearly showed themselves in the 1980s and were representatives of the so-called “left” Moscow Union of Artists, which is a long-established abbreviation of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists. This probably requires some clarification. Thus, since the late 1960s, the political climate in our country has changed significantly. Official cultural policy was to ignore all phenomena in art that related to the dissident movement. At the same time, it was necessary to encourage young authors who were not directly related to nonconformism. A youth section was created at the Moscow Union of Artists, which was quite loyal to manifestations of selfhood and “otherness.” That is why the artists who were members of the “youth group” could allow themselves more free expressions and offer an art alternative to socialist realism.

The exhibition “Friends/Aliens” is collected from works by now recognized classics of late Soviet art, which 40 years ago were not only in little demand, but were literally on the brink. At first glance, it may seem that their canvases are deliberately rough, but this impression is deceptive - behind the apparent simplicity and sharpness lie deep meanings, freedom and, often, audacity.

Natalya Nesterova (1944 – 2022) is one of the most outstanding women artists of the second half of the 20th century, “the Amazon of the left Moscow Union of Artists”. Stylistically, her works gravitate toward traditional popular print art. Let us note that she is a subtle painter who combines in her works the nuances of an impasto palette and differentiation with a naive design.

Art critic Vitaly Patsyukov: “The heroes of Natalia Nesterova’s compositions perform ordinary regular actions: they eat, walk, play a wide variety of games, catch butterflies, meet ships, dance, fall in love. But for some reason, the butterflies fly away, forks and spoons disappear on the dinner table, steamships pass along the shore without stopping, and lovers cannot find a common language… Natalia Nesterova’s painting lives like a boat from childhood, moving in the rapid flows of culture, preserving its original bright, inescapable dreams, where the tragedy of the adult world is always compensated by the great play of creativity.”

Dmitry Ikonnikov (1952 – 2019) is one of the most controversial and confusing authors. By training, he was a graphic artist and never deviated from the path chosen during his student years - Ikonnikov worked exclusively on paper. We note, however, that it is difficult for an untrained viewer to identify his works as graphic. This is also due to the fact that Ikonnikov often worked in a large format and attached the sheets to a solid base. In addition, the artist, as a rule, chose gouache as a material for creating images, but his creative method turned thick and dense paint into a light, almost weightless substance. The artist built a complex and multi-layered space in each of his works.

Art critic Andrei Tolstoy: “Sometimes, looking at Ikonnikov’s works, it seems that we are looking at fragments of some never-before-seen paintings on the walls of unbuilt buildings. This is evidenced by the author’s undoubted ability to subordinate his solution to a single compositional and coloristic task, which guarantees integrity, and, as a consequence, the internal monumentality of the composition.”

Lev Tabenkin (born 1952) graduated from the Moscow Printing Institute in 1975 and just three years later became a member of the Union of Artists. His work was almost immediately noted by critics, who recognized him as a master of plastic painting. For Tabenkin, color is almost like clay from which he sculpts his heroes. Grotesque animals symbolize human passions, freedom, strength, suffering and weakness. Although the plots of the works are very simple, they are convincing, vital and self-sufficient.

“The artist almost always resembles some kind of discoverer of new islands, continents, worlds, galaxies. My experience today is the experience of overcoming vulgarity, voicelessness, imposed concepts,” Lev Tabenkin said about himself.

Moscow artist Vasily Shulzhenko (b. 1949) can rightfully be called a master of grotesque realism, or, as the artist himself defines it, “figurative painting in the genre of free fantasy.” A deliberately caricatured and surreal, but apt depiction of the life of ordinary Russian people in the work of Vasily Shulzhenko evokes ambiguous, contradictory feelings in the viewer. It is through the satirical, sometimes even obscene subjects of his paintings that the artist draws attention to the problems and underbelly of the society in which he lives. Shulzhenko depicts the world of Russian people as they are, at once strange and unsightly, but at the same time catchy and familiar in their simplicity and truthfulness.