Just before leaving for Italy I managed to get invited for the opening of the exhibition: New Art from Russia at the Saatchi Gallery. The exhibition was well organised I found the members of stuff informative & it was nice to get a free glass of wine while going around the Gallery. I started looking at the work on the ground floor in particular at Janis Avotins in Gallery 5 ghostly, thinly painted canvases using acrylics of mainly female figures that one can hardly see due to the monochrome use of paints which give an evocative feel to the work.The figures are shown isolated & unrecognisable giving them a sense of phantom like air which somehow fit in between being central while melting into the background of the painting. In the same room there is also the work of Nika Neelova which is made of Burnt and waxed wood, paper and ink positioned opposite Janis Avotins paintings in the main room so one can go around the sculptural installation made out of old beams, casts and worn ropes so shown, re-composed in a different way from their original use. The just apposition of the ghostly paintings on the walls with the burned & waxed wood in the corners of the room worked well as both artists in different ways deal with history. While Janis Avotins deals with history of memory that disappears the figure from the collective memory making it anonymous. Nika Neelova works with memory history where we get shown how one reads and distorts in the present the past also shown by the ironic title of the art work. Then I went to Gallery 10 where I saw the work of Valery Koshlyakov: large scale cardboard paintings forming a collage of the the Grand Opera in Paris again we are looking at how things are seen interpreted such as the old empire and at how everything is ephemeral or a mad fantasy depending on once own interpretation as one can seen from the the unfinished details in which the painting is made not showing a final piece of a solid Opera house but more like a fragile imagined castle. I found interesting the contrast between the flimsy support of the cardboard (which replace the solidity of the canvas) with the subject: the actual Opera House which is reminiscent of opulence, solidity, status completely the opposite of the cardboard. The use of Tempera in making the work and also the Opera House makes one think that the artist as a keen interest in ancient ruins when I was looking at it I thought I might have been looking at ancient ruins or a building in Rome this was given by the energetic brush strokes of the tempera and the passing by of time contrasted by the use of cardboard and a sense of irony towards monumental Government buildings with a reference to the Stalin era.
In Gallery 4 Daniel Bragin is another artist which questions through the use of opposite materials how we view things like in the work Bedtime Story which is made using broken windshield glass and hold together by PVC strings. I found the piece moving and chilling at the same time. As the Bed cover is not made of a nice woolly comfortable blanket but made of windshield broken glass which one would associate with car accidents, violence possibly a lost childhood a dark bedtime story not a light one and then all hold together by coloured PVC plastic threads which gives a touch of lightness, innocence to a rather dark fragile story.
Jana Avotins Untitled on canvas 2012
Valery Koshlyakow Grand Opera, 1995
Daniel Bragin Bedtime story 2012
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