Yuri Gusev. "MSTA" 18+ Automatic translate

Erarta Museum presents an exhibition of the famous St. Petersburg artist Yuri Gusev. MSTA is an experience of immersion in the serene world of solitude, self-knowledge and love

• A man’s life on the promised land in the Russian outback
• Stories about friends-painters, opening days and creativity
• The author who managed to express in his works the cycle of life and the inner light of hope

Yuri Gusev (1939–2018), "romantic artist-intellectual" - as Anatoly Zaslavsky defined him in an article for the magazine "Our Heritage" - was not a realist illustrator who wrote only the physical shell of the world. His metaphorical painting, like fragments of philosophical and poetic texts, is associated with the theme of self-knowledge, with immersion in oneself, with the feeling of one’s own presence. The artist’s works form a kind of human life on the promised land - the Msta River, located in the south of the Novgorod region, where the Valdai Upland begins, has become such a land for him. He, then a student, discovered these places for himself in the late 1960s.

In the 70s, Yuri Gusev bought a house on Msta, where he came every summer for several decades. Msta became for the author a form of a saving escape from the “disciplinary space” of civilization into a calm, natural world. We see how here, in Valdai’s Eden, naked, like Adam, the artist is reclining on a green hill next to his Eve, whose gaze is directed to the sky; here they talk, frolic and fly; even cows ride bicycles here.

It is difficult to say how this inner space, woven of dreams, dreams, visual metaphors, relates to everyday, geographical space. "MSTA" by Gusev is a story about the serene world of solitude, self-immersion, creativity and love of two no longer young people who are experiencing sometimes traumatic collisions with the surrounding reality. In one of the works, under metaphysically white clouds, the artist suddenly falls from his bicycle into the dust of the road - as if Icarus is thrown down from the sky. And in this interrupted flight there is so much irony, sadness and awareness of finiteness: Valdai Adam on the bank of the Msta is aware of his frailty.

And also this project is stories about friends-painters, about opening days, about creativity. For many years, Yuri Gusev participated in exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Monterrey, Seattle, taught at the Theater Academy. He taught drawing and painting at the Faculty of Art fascinatingly - but he waited for the summer to return to Mstu. A small but capacious exhibition in Erarta acquaints the viewer with the poetics and special pictorial language of the author - a deep artist who is unlike anyone else, who managed to convey in his works the cycle of life, the phantasmagoria of reality and the inner light of hope.