PENULTIMATE TRUTHS

RUSSIAN ART BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND CONCEPT

The exhibition features the work of twelve of the most influential non-conformist Russian artists, spanning around seventy paintings, sculptures and graphic works drawn mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s. These artists had departed from the officially prescribed patriotic path of socialist realism. Stalin’s death in 1953 was a watershed moment for the creation of their own, ‘unofficial’ art.
The works displayed are by artists who felt deeply indebted to metaphysical and transcendental concepts. This group of non-conformist artists – including painters such as Dmitri Krasnopevtsev, Mikhail Shvartsman, Edik Steinberg and Vladimir Weisberg – developed a style that became typical of the ‘Moscow Metaphysicians’. Although they did not form their own unified school, the ‘metaphysical’ or the ‘quintessence of an object beyond its concrete qualities’ are key terms for understanding their art. The artists considered it their duty to unveil the spiritual and other inner truths hidden behind exterior forms.

The exhibition opens with the work of the Russian-German artist Alexej von Jawlensky, who began as early as 1911 to paint stylised heads that filled the entire frame, employing bold black lines and intense, artificial colours. Although Jawlensky mainly carved out his career in Germany, his groups of works bear a clear resemblance to Russian iconography in their use of heads, faces and meditations. Mikhail Shvartsman, too, transformed human faces into ‘metaphysical heads’. Inspired by mysticism, Shvartsman’s art from the mid-1960s is characterised by emblematic-architectural compositions, which he referred to as ‘hierarchies’. Another member of the Moscow metaphysicians, Steinberg preferred working with completely abstract shapes, to which he nevertheless lent a spiritual dimension. His works were intended to express a longing for union with the divine. The objects depicted in Krasnopevtsev’s still lifes seem to have cast aside all marks of time, presenting a dimension of harmony, order and stillness. 

The Penultimate Truths exhibition presents the works of the Moscow metaphysicists in conjunction with those of the Moscow conceptualists Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Dmitri Prigov, who created textual images to explore the relationship between form and meaning. While artists such as Prigov and Erik Bulatov delved into the symbols, myths and rituals of mainstream Soviet culture, Grisha Bruskin’s series of sculptures, Metamorphoses, also on display in the exhibition, is more concerned with Kabbalistic thought. The two colours which dominate Bruskin’s sculptures, red and black, symbolise creation and nothingness. Oleg Vassiliev’s oeuvre is considered a fusion of two important traditions within Russian art: realistic painting from the nineteenth century and the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Vassiliev’s work is a constant examination of light and space, bringing concrete motifs together with abstract, one-dimensional, flat shapes.

Works drawn from the ahlers collection are complemented by works on loan from prominent European museums and private collections.