News

4 June 2008

The State Hermitage Museum
Horacio Garcia Rossi and GRAV. The Geometry of Imaginary Space
16 May 2008 – 14 September 2008

The exhibition in halls 339 – 342 of the Winter Palace is a continuation of sorts relating to an earlier exhibition titled Italian Kinetic Movement, organized at the State Hermitage Museum in 2006. Displayed are 40 works by GRAV artists (from the French Group de Recherche d’Art Visual – Group of Visual Arts Research), collected from museum and private collections and encompassing half a century of creativity.

The GRAV group was formed in France in 1960 when the dominant, mainstream trends in the visual arts were pop-art and op-art (“optical-art”), both considered reactions to contemporary, technological, omnipresent advertisement and mass-culture. But if pop-art played with popular images and symbols, often interpreting them ironically, op-art, having developed from the geometrical abstraction of the 1920-30s, was the “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of the 1960s, with its passion for exact sciences, cybernetics, new technologies and discoveries in the field of human perception. Members of GRAV focused on this optical art. The Group’s declaration was signed by both renowned masters, such as Francois Morellet, Victor Vasarely (Vasarhelyi) and Jean-Pierre Yvaral (son of the latter), and young artists like Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, Francisco Sobrino and Joel Stein, who arrived in Paris from Argentina in late 1950s.

GRAV’s members experimented mainly in the field of optical and kinesthetic art. Their manifesto, Enough Mystification (1961), proclaimed: “There shall never be works of art intended to be perceived solely by the cultured eye, by the sensitive eye, by the intellectual eye, by the aesthete eye or the amateur eye. It is the human eye that shall be our reference point”. Their focus on the human eye as an organ of perception - one that reacts and responds to optical illusions without conscious interpretation - led these young artists to attempt the creation of a genuinely universal art, one they believed could be appreciated and understood by anybody regardless of ethnicity, nationality, aesthetic tastes or level of education.

GRAV artists invented all kinds of optical illusions based on the effect of "surface quasi-deformation," a conflict between the static and the dynamic that agitates the eye, stimulating it to continuous form-generation, making the viewer a co-creator of the image. The paradox consists in op-art - which is based on thorough consideration, highly rationalized and disciplined - appealing not to the intellect but to the immediate reflex, through which one is able to appreciate its structurally perfect compositions. Op-art works don’t require long and thoughtful contemplation. "Meaningful content" is thus rejected for the sake of constant shifting, transformation, the illusion of motion, visible image-energy. F. Sobrino’s swelling and pulsating pictorial surfaces; J.-P. Yvaral’s kaleidoscopically indefinable structures and moving progressions; J. Stein’s iridescent spirals; V.Vasarely’s inconsistent labyrinth-like forms; and the geometrical constructions of F. Morellet and J.Le Parc - these works, though created in strict accordance with the rules of mathematics, are basically unstable. These models of “perpetuum mobile” are inconceivably static and dynamic, abstract and concrete, clear and ambiguous, all at the same time.

GRAV’s members rejected the idea of the Artist as "genious figure," emphasizing instead the importance of creative cooperation for the coming into being of a “solid and unified basis of collective theoretical and practical experience”. This, however, did not preclude the Group from disagreements and conflicts, which were aggravated over time. After GRAV was dissolved in 1968 as a result of apparent contradiction between their declared values (anonymity, etc.) and its individual members’ involvement in commercial art and other promotional activities, the artists mainly proceeded with their own development of the same ideas and principles that had once brought them together.

Horacio Garcia Rossi, the group’s leading figure, was born in 1929 in Buenos-Aires (Argentina). As a student of the National Academy of Fine Arts (Buenos-Aires) in 1950–1957, he made the acquaintance of young artists who would later contribute to the founding of GRAV. Rossi’s early paintings are mainly experiments with flat black-and-white forms. A characteristic feature of his GRAV-period works is the introduction of light and motion. His studies on the changeability-problem took shape as a series of moving light installations named Unstable Light Boxes. Since then, light has been a key element of all his works. Rossi experiments with light’s expressive properties, playing not only with graphic vibration, but also with its materiality. He put forth considerable effort to invent a dynamic alphabet whose every letter would be associated with an image, bright and vigorous, fitting with the letter’s shape and sound. His exercises in this sphere were crowned by a series of original “portraits” of names including those of the master’s family and fellow artists.

Since the late 1970s, Rossi has devoted his time to researching the interaction of light and colour, resulting in a new artistic medium that he calls Couleur lumiere (“Colour-light”), the main “subject” of a series of his works from that time. In his recent cycle, Chaos (2006–2007), the “colour-light” alternatively flashes, bursts or dies away on the canvas. It produces the dynamic moving effect that he has long been striving to achieve with the help of motors, lamps and other electro-mechanic equipment. In the piece, wide planes are crossed by an intense universal-scale confrontation of light-lines in flux, discharging a flood of energy into which the viewer plunges - witness to the eternal conflict between Chaos and Order, which inevitably ends in the victory of Light giving birth to Matter.

Horacio Garcia Rossi and GRAV. The Geometry of Imaginary Space was organized by the State Hermitage Museum together with Il Cigno Galileo Galilei Publishers (Rome, Italy) under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Republic in Saint Petersburg and the Consulate General of the Italian Republic in Saint Petersburg.

The exhibition is overseen by N.B. Demina, Junior Research Associate of the Department of Western European Art of the State Hermitage Museum.

Internet: http://www.hermitagemuseum.org

Phone: 571-34-65

4 June 2008

The State Hermitage Museum
In the Wild Kingdom of Nature
The Graphic Work of Heinrich Theodor Wehle from German Museums
10 June 2008 – 7 September 2008

Sixty-three works by the artist Heinrich Theodor Wehle (1778 – 1805) are to be displayed at the exhibition, taken from museums in Sorbs, Bautzen, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and private collections from Dessau and Erfurt.
Wehle’s drawings can be divided into three stylistic groups:  sketches done with pencil and those, which represent  the larger part of his work, done in ink, the completed works demonstrating compact lines and carefully developed details which assume that the works will be reproduced as prints, and illustrations executed by brush.
Wehle was the first western European master to have printed (1802-1803) views from the Caucasus, a location which to this day has not come into the general cultural view of the western European public.
Steep cliffs and impregnable, seemingly everlasting mountain ridges with the occasional ruins of a fortress on the peaks, stones in the beds of wild rivers and waterfalls, horsemen and soldiers, travellers in caravans or holiday makers by a cross corroded by wind and rain – all of this is represented in the pictures by the artist, created in the Caucasus.
Had Wehle not died so young, in the first quarter of the 19th century, he would have stood among the great artists such as Zingg and Klengel, Koch and Reinhard, Kaspar David Freidrich and Christian Klausen Dahl. He would have held a worthy place among German, and perhaps even Russian artists, not only as a sketcher but possibly as a painter.

Nonetheless, even the part of the creativity of Heinrich Theodor Wehle which has reached us is a rich, diverse and impressive artistic legacy.
Internet: http://www.hermitagemuseum.org

Phone: 571-34-65

4 June 2008

The State Russian Museum

IVAN SHISHKIN
From the Collection of the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery

24 April - 23 July 2008
Benois Wing
The anniversary exhibition of the artworks of acknowledged «patriarch of forests» in the Russian Museum is the project that was made in collaboration with Tretyakov Gallery. It is the continuation of the series of private viewings that are dedicated to the great artists of national fine art. The exhibition will present for viewers more than 100 paintings, drawings, engravings by Ivan Shishkin. Among them there are the well-known paintings such as «Morning in a Pine Forest» (Tretyakov Gallery), «A Rye Field» (Tretyakov Gallery), «Winter» (Russian Museum) and little-known artworks by the artist

Internet: http://www.rusmuseum.ru

Phone: 595-42-48

4 June 2008

The State Russian Museum

COLLECTION OF PRINCESS MARIA TENISHEVA
On the 110th Anniversary of the Russian Museum
23 April 2008
Benois Wing
On the exhibition that is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Princess Maria Tenisheva and the 110th anniversary of the Russian Museum the best artworks from the collection of Maria Tenisheva, which are the pride of the museum, will be presented. For the duration of the history the most part of these artworks was shown on different exhibitions and published in albums. And now the viewers will get the opportunity to enjoy the masterpieces of watercolours and drawings by the Russian art school of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century once again and appreciate the taste of the collector, her passions and generosity of her gift.
The exhibition will contain more than hundred artworks. Among the artworks of the first half of the 19th century the prominent names of the epoch will be presented. They are: Aleksey Venetsianov, Orest Kiprensky, Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov and the others. Maria Tenisheva was very much obliged to Princess Ekaterina Svyatopolk-Chetvertinskaya, her friend and associate, for many sheets from this part of the collection.
The artworks of the second half of the 19th century may be separated conventionally on two unequal parts.
The lesser part contains the artworks by the prominent masters of that period. They are: Ivan Kramskoi, Ivan Shishkin, Ilya Repin, Isaac Levitan and other less known artists.
The larger part contains the artworks by the participants of «The Society of the Russian Watercolourists».
The artworks by such artists of the turn of the 19th and the 20th century as Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Aleksandr Benois, Lev Bakst, Elena Polenova, Nikolai Roerich, are the centrepiece of the collection.
Alongside the sculpture and the archives from the Funds of the Russian Museum viewers will be able to get acquainted with photographs that imprinted the appearance of Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva.
The film that reconstructs the main stages of the life of Maria Tenisheva and the history of forming of her collection of watercolours and drawings are prepared for the exhibition

Internet: http://www.rusmuseum.ru

Phone: 595-42-48

4 June 2008

The State Russian Museum

Antique Subjects in Russian Art
Permanent exposition
St. Michael's Castle

The exhibition showcases works of the Russian artists of the XVIII c. They are all devoted to antique subjects and belong to the collection of the Russian museum. Among them are canvases of the important academic master I.Akimov, works of the wonderful Russian landscape painter F.Matveyev, sketches of K.Bryullov, as well as a work of one of the first Russian pensioners in Italy - M.Puchinov. The exhibition is situated in the Hall of antiques, which is not accidentally. Since the times of Paul I, who was fond of antique art, works of antique sculpture have been located here.
Interest in antiquity in the Russian culture of the XVIII c is connected with appearance and development of secular art in Russia. The Academy of arts, which was founded in St.Petersburg in 1757, saw antiquity as a source of subjects for its students and graduates. That is why pensioner trips to Italy in the last quarter of the century became nearly obligatory. Personal examination by Russian artists of antique monuments and of west-european interpretations of subjects from ancient Roman and Greek mythology contributed to drawing of the national masters in the All-European art tradition.

The Hall of Antiques
The Hall of Antiques was a part of a suite of apartments of a Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich and a Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alekseyevna. It was designed by an architect Vincenzo Brenna in 1799-1801. The basis of decoration of the room was formed with antique sculpture. The walls of the room were decorated with eight paintings by S.Shchedrin, and there were pictorial plafonds created by J.-B.Scotti on the ceiling.
After 1801 the Chancellery of the Empress Marie Fyodorovna was situated in the Antique Room, and later, at the times of the Nicholas Engineers' College it was used as a Recreation hall; and in 1894 it was altered for the needs of barracks for the school's cadets. The room was refashioned several times, that is why its decoration has noticeably changed. The stucco moulding of the walls and ceiling (around chandeliers), and corner ovens, which exist here now, date from the time of the Engineers' College. During the restoration of 2001-2003 signs of caissons with modelled rosettes, which date from the original decoration of the room, were found on a cornice, and they were reconstructed

Internet: http://www.rusmuseum.ru

Phone: 595-42-48