Facets - Vivat St. Petersburg
January 27 - March 8, 2003
View Pavillion Exhibit featuring Gilbert Grosvenor
FACETS
"One of the small polished plane surfaces of a cut gem" or "aspect, phase."
The exhibition of oil paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs and silkscreen prints is entitled "Facets" to express the jewel-like totality of art that emerged from Russia after the Soviet empire collapsed. It is a modest attempt to focus on the multiplicity of visual expressions we call Russian contemporary art. Each aspect, like the several facets of a single precious gem, is an authentic, contemporary point of view. Yet, they did not arise full-blown like some modern Botticelli's Venus but rather demostrate a way of seeing and feeling that is clearly sprung from the stream of history.
In the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, several important waves of interest arose around the art of Russia and of the other former Soviet republics. They took the form of highly publicized international auctions, exhibitions and press coverage. At first, there seemed to be a tendency for observers to see a homogenous body of images that could be forced into a broad category called "Contemporary Russian" or "Post-Soviet" art. The imagery was rife with gray figures, in narratives that were satirical and contemptuous or outright condemnatory of Soviet life. Such work set the stage for a perception of the emergent Russian art as heavy, gloomy, depressing, teheoretically anti-Soviet, and therefor reactionary.
Now that the channels of communication are more open and artists of the former Soviet Union have become true cosmopolitans, they enjoy travel anywhere and free access to the Internet. Consequently, a more diverse and less tendentious art is being created in Eastern Europe, and the changing picture is being recognized worldwide.
In this exhibition, most works shown were produced in the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is interesting that the freedom that these artists now enjoy has produced a multiplicity of styles, themes and subject matter that are not defined by broad categorizations. If anything, they have settled into their own very personal explorations of styles, techniques and subjects that until recently were forbidden or considered politically and therefore stylistically incorrect. Several of them, like Alexander Anufriev, Michail Chemiakin and Yaroslav Koporulin, live outside Russia now. The majority of works in the show are by well-known St. Petersburg artists, most of whom still live in Russia or have home bases in more than one country. The works contain elements of symbolism, the metaphysical, existential and philosophical, as well as styles that were long forbidden under the Soviets.
Alexander Anufriev
Annunciation, 1997-2002
(oil on canvas)
Alexander Anufriev
Trio, 2000
(oil on canvas)
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St. Petersburg exercises its influence particularly on the work of Chemiakin, Liukshin and Ivanov. In subtle fashion, often touched by fantasy, they set up opposition between the hallucinogenic and the real. Such tension is, in fact, a hallmark of the work of many of the artists exhibited. To that extent, St. Petersburg, the city, is the subject and theme. Studying the exhibit, the masterpiece of Andrey Bely springs to mind. Peterburg, published in 1913, is the best-known work by the Russian symbolist poet and theorist, memoirist, essayist and novelist. It is a baroque evocation by Bely of Russia's pre-revolutionary capital in a novel featuring the city itself as the main character. The novel, with its playful use of language and literary experiments, has often been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses. Like Gogol and Dostoevsky before him, Bely portrayed the city in dramatic, mythical light, and mixed hallucination with reality.
In the same year that Bely wrote his book, a young American named Gilbert H. Grosvenor experimented with the first cartridge-film camera on a trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow and their environs. Freed from the slow exposures of glass plates and the clumsiness of tripod and hood, he went about recording images of daily life in Czarist Russia as well as stately monuments and ancient churches that would soon to be destroyed in the atheistic fervor of the Revolution of 1917. Grosvenor, later to found The National Geographic Society, gave posterity the remarkable images in this exhibit, clear pictures freezing in time what it was like in an era destroyed forever by another era that, seven decades later, would itself implode.
Alla Rogers, January 2002
Guest Curator
All work is courtesy of the Alla Rogers Gallery, 1054 31 Street NW, Canal Square-Georgetown, Washington, DC 20007, 202-333-8595, allarogers@cs.com.