Stas Blinov
Gethsemane Prayer
1994 Detail Oil on Canvas 90x70
Contemporary modern art is multi-faceted and multi-layered.
It reflects, as it should, the social, emotional, ethical and arsthetic state of a society.
In this artistic world is inevitably becoming intereasingly no ticeable.
This is a normal process.
Technical progress cannot fully alter human nature,
People who were born and raised in different natural,
social and cultural conditions see the world in different ways.
Theys set store by different things, even when analysing the same content.
That is how things have alwas been and will no doubt remain.
Otherwise the world would lose the rich tonality reflected in world culture.
In its structure, contemporary Russian art is not much different from any other.
Nowadays, as has so often been the case, our contemporaries know only a few artists: those who appear more often than others on their TV screens, the internet or in the press.
Their popularity often bears little correalation to the quality of their art.
But future generations of viewers and historians will be the judges of that, as they will be of the works by artists who are yet to become celebrities.
Time will teil! That wise old aphorism applies to art as much as it does to anything else!
Which means the modern viewer needs to see all sorts of things, as long as they are quality!
The Russian Museum in St Petersburg holds to that principle and it can afford to with an enormous collection of 400,000 exhibits.
Because our historical experience tells us the following: the museum has works from the 18th-20th centuries by artists who were actively exhibited in their day; much was written about them in newspapers and magazines; their works sold successfully.
The decades and centuries pass and it turns out than in retrospect their value is now perhaps purely in their undoubted skill and generic character.
At the same time, works by other artists who, for a variety of reasons, were a lot less well-known to their contemporaries or not held in the highest regard by them, are now pearls which vividly,
precisely and subtly portray the time and individuality of the artists.
The works assembled for the exhibition in Zurich only
reflect certain facets of contemporary Russian art.
Irony and the grotesque, an interpretion of everyday and human dramas,
the pursuit of and diversion from painting and sculptural traditions can all be seen in the art of this
art of this comparatively small group of artists whose works have been part of a numbers of different
exhibitions at the Russsian Museum.
They form a part --- however small --- of contemporary Russian visual culture.
Evgenia Petrova, Ph.D. in Art History,
Deputy Director of the Russian Museum