NB Gallery
RDH
This compact but lively gallery specialises in promoting artists from the recently overshadowed late Soviet era. Because of this, prices are accessible; and so is enjoying the art. The impressive Mai Dantsig exhibition (Passport, December 2011) was always going to be a hard act to follow. Currently on show is ‘Duo’, the work of husband and wife Evsey Reshin and Valeria Sizyakova. Originally teacher and student, Reshin’s influence on the Moscow school of Art was wide and profound, even beyond his death in 1978. Ms. Sizyakova was present at the vernissage in February, a proud witness to her work in assembling both of their collections. A knowledgeable and committed audience made for a voluble evening, and brisk sales.
Variety was abundant, with perhaps three main themes. Rural landscapes dominated by volume, combining soft and gracious scenes at once ethereal and idealistic, with harder images of the mess made by Russia’s harsh and changing seasons alternating. Many guests were drawn to the still life and domestic pictures, which exuded cheer and freshness, engagingly and realistically, without the falseness and excessive unrealistic light of all too many lesser works. Finally, street scenes, often at twilight or in the turning seasons evoke the real, unspectacular daily rhythm in a Russian city, with window and bus lights simultaneously offering warmth while failing to pierce the gathering gloom. All three styles capture aspects of Soviet, and enduring Russian reality. Works that are well rooted in both their space and their time.
|
NB Gallery 6/2 Sivstev Vrashek,
119019 Moscow, a few minutes stroll
from Kropotkinskaya Metro.
www.nbgallery.com
|
|
