Artist Statement:
A THOUSAND AND ONE MORNINGS
In the "Thousand and One Nights" the web spun by the storyteller transforms the world into something beautiful and precious, like the ornamentation in Oriental art. The figure of Scheherezade is symbolic of that of the artist in general. She is forced to keep on inventing and creating to stave off death.
The tales in "A Thousand and One Nights" are told at night, before sleep, and they are connected to dreams and to death. Their colours are dark blue and silver.
I have called this exhibition "A Thousand and One Mornings" because I wanted it to be the same and yet different. The pictures in this exhibition are in the colours of morning, red and gold. Morning is a time of hope and expectation when everything seems new and everything is possible, just as it was when we were children.
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The most important influence on my work is the art of the religious icon in Russia. The art education that I received at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts was in the European tradition and I only became aware of the older traditions of Russian art - particularly the art of icon painting - through the art of the avant-garde in the immediate post-revolutionary period (artists such as Malevich, Rodchenko, Larionov and others). Avant-garde artists of the early soviet period took existing forms of icon painting and substituted political symbols for religious imagery, so that , for instance a soldier with a red flag takes the place of St George holding a spear. For me this appropriation and transformation of religious symbols, characteristic of the entire culture of the time is something negative, reminiscent of a werewolf-like transformation. More recently, post-modernism has also taken to stealing in the same way as modernism before it. The difference is that now this stealing takes place deliberately and openly, whereas the influences that informed the avant-garde of the 1920's were not openly paraded and thus less immediately obvious.
In the mid-1980's in the period of Perestroika, I became involved with experimental and performance art. At that time Russia went through a second period of intense experimental artistic activity with the flourishing of new forms. Artists of my generation felt that they needed to experience for themselves what had been happening over the last 60 years or so in the West, after having been cut off and isolated for so long. Elements of experimentation still play a role in my work now, particularly when begin work on a painting. Experimentation and play help subdue the role of the intellect which is an obstacle to creativity.
Pushkin once wrote " well done Pushkin, good for you" - the artistic body distanced from the intellect and personal.
