Zero Sixty: Gennadii Gogoliuk

This exhibition started life as a retrospective of paintings planned to coincide with Gena’s sixtieth birthday in March. Having worked with Gena over the years I should have known an exhibition could never be that simple and that my suggested title might indeed have fallen “into banality”. Instead it became ‘Zero Sixty’ in homage to the artist, Malevich, a title that also managed to dismiss age itself, letting time slip by as unnoticed as it is irrelevant. It reminded me of my first encounter with Gena’s work twenty years ago. ‘The Black Monk’ (opposite), was a small oil painting in a homemade frame, hanging in the cavernous halls of the Royal Scottish Academy and, to my mind, dominating everything around it. It was a fascinating picture, with layers of encrusted paint that suggested an object of great age at odds with a show of contemporary artists. When I finally arranged a visit to see Gogoliuk, he was not the elderly artist I had imagined, but in his forties, living in a small flat with his wife, Rose France, and their young daughter, Lucy, then aged three. And far from a studio filled with a lifetime of work as I had hoped, there were only two canvases, which Rose told me Gennadii would simply repaint every time a new idea came to him, obliterating what was there before. The Black Monk was just a rare survivor of those early years.

As I got to know Gena and Rose, I became fascinated with the story of his rigourous training at the Leningrad Academy, as a scenic painter at the Kirov Theatre (now the Mariinsky) and his role in the avant-garde artistic groups that that emerged during the upheavals of Perestroika. It seemed as complex and exciting as any of the great artistic movements of the 20th century and I was delighted when Rose agreed to write an essay describing those formative years and providing an account of his performances and then his return to painting after leaving Russia in 1998. As the scope of the exhibition broadened I was lucky enough to meet Gena’s great friend, Professor Yuri Koteltsev whose energy and enthusiasm for bringing the show to Russia led to an introduction to Anna Albertovna, Deputy Artistic Director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg who will host the show when circumstances allow. To all three, I am immensely grateful.

Like his performances Gena’s paintings are spontaneous acts and, for him, concerned only about the creation of an idea. They exist in that moment and when finished their future is of no concern to Gena, survival is a matter of chance. Those qualities of timelessness and impermanence that characterise his working practice allow Gena to take risks, avoid complacency and make paintings that seem fresh and full of purpose. Therefore it seems oddly appropriate that this should be an exhibition existing without the customary start or end date; an exhibition that has to exist, for the moment, out of time.

John Martin