- Past Exhibitions
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Gennadii Gogoliuk - On The Edge Of Things
21 October - 7 November 2003
On the paintings of Gennadii Gogoliuk
Eight years ago, I began to notice a strange feature in the work of artist friends from the Volga region of Russia - not only those representing the national minorities, but Russian artists, too. These artists, all of whom were acquainted with the various "post-isms" of the flagging modern art of the last millennium were beginning, with growing insistency, to return to the life surrounding them - to the native streets and alleys of their own towns, to native, familiar, human faces and figures and to their native soil - to a concrete, rather than a symbolic, native land.
In a poem written in 1996 I spoke of this tendency towards domestication, making intimate of the painted human environment:
This art I, joking, call it 'intimism' - counds bad but many historical isms sounds no better
I was reminded of this when I became acquainted with the delicate and powerful work of Gennadii Gogoliuk. What had appeared to me then, dimly, as a veiled hint, is here made manifest with technical sophistication but, for all that, with a clear purity of heart, devoted to simple things. In my opinion, Gennadii Gogoliuk could be termed an outstanding 'intimist' now entering the arena of European art.
Be that as it may, I see his work, which creates the "eternally-simple simpicity of the work-as-miracle" (again, I am quoting myself) as yet another example of the new return to reality which, precisely becasue it is new, possesses elements of fairytale and theatricality.
Gennady Aygi
12 June 2003, Moscow