That his life is a game: they spread the cards in the Tretyakov Gallery
Playing cards have become his signature element. He drew their characters, used suit signs in compositions, and even pasted the contents of a real deck directly onto the canvas. Nevertheless, Vladimir Nemukhin's work is more voluminous and complex than any party. The exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, which opened in the New Tretyakov Gallery, confirms this. Izvestia was among the first to see the resulting alignment.
The Age of the Sixties
Most recently, the AZ ART Center celebrated Dmitry Krasnopevtsev's centenary with a retrospective and the publication of a voluminous catalog. Now it's the turn of his peer and comrade Vladimir Nemukhin. Both of them are so—called nonconformists. Representatives of the brilliant galaxy of artists from the sixties, who were not recognized by the authorities and ignored by the official academic community in Soviet times, but who became incredibly in demand already in the 21st century.
Today, the names of Zverev, Plavinsky, Weisberg, Rabin, Tselkov and others, including, of course, the authors mentioned above, attract the attention of the widest public. And the main thing that impresses in them is freedom and individuality (one is closely related to the other). Each of these masters has a recognizable style, each has a trademark, whether it's geometric figures disappearing in a milky haze from Weisberg, muzzles from Tselkov, mundane objects like dried fish, newspapers and a greasy ruble from Rabin. Well— or Nemukhin's playing cards.
And although you expect the most revealing, exemplary works from the anniversary retrospective, it is no less interesting to look at the context of creativity and make sure that even after finding his "I" to the fullest, the author did not engage in self-repetition, did not reduce creativity to juggling several proven techniques, but was constantly looking for new things and moving forward. The exposition in the New Tretyakov Gallery fully meets these aspirations, despite the relatively small space (Hall 38), which accommodates about 60 exhibits.
I put it on the card
The logic of the narrative is conditionally chronological. First, we are shown the environment in which Nemukhin began: these are representatives of the so-called Lianoz group, other nonconformists — Rabin, Kropyvnitsky, Zverev, Yankilevsky, etc. They are represented by one or two works, and Nemukhin's early work looks completely organic in this neighborhood - the expressive "Abstraction" (1962) and the more restrained in color, but artistic in form, "Rooster", created much later (in 1981), but continuing the same line.
And on the next wall, which covers the period when N. Emukhin just finds his main "card" motif, there are keys to explaining what these games grew out of. There is a Nemukhinsky sculpture "Dedication to L. Lisitsky" (a ball in a bronze bowl stand), a cycle of images of a jack and two works referring to Malevich.
So, the roots of the hero of the day's art go back, of course, to the Russian avant-garde of the first half of the century. And for all the aesthetic distance between Nemukhin's exquisitely laconic images and the primitivist tricks of Ilya Mashkov and Mikhail Larionov, the founders of the Jack of Diamonds association, it is impossible not to see a conscious allusion here. As well as the continuity of Nemukhinsky geometricism in relation to "prouns" (three-dimensional suprematism) is evident Lissitzky and Malevich's costumes for the opera Victory over the Sun, rigid structures with Cubist motifs.
Yes, many nonconformists paid tribute to Malevich: in the late 1950s, Zverev created a series of works referring to the suprematist compositions of the 1910s, Francisco Infante laid out colorful figures in the snow, moving mystical Supremus from cosmic infinity into the Russian winter. But for Nemukhin, this was not a short—term hobby, but an assemblage point - something from which a mature artist eventually grew. And when you look at his later works, parallels with the art of a bygone era hardly come to mind. On someone else's soil, he raised something original, his own.
Maps, buckets, fishing lines
Take, for example, his work "Departing Objects" (1981). Lines stretch through the white plywood to the coarse burlap at the bottom. Real maps and objects in the form of boats are glued to this improvised canvas. Where are they going? What kind of game is going on here? Riddle. But there is an incomprehensible inner logic to this. And — beauty, both concrete and abstract.
Perhaps the beauty of Nemukhin's method lies precisely in the paradoxical combination of speculative compositional sophistication and the mundane nature of the main motif. High art and card games — could there be a stranger symbiosis? It is tempting to see irony in this, just as in Rabin's garbage dumps and Kabakov's communal apartments we feel a hidden rebuke of the Soviet reality of the stagnation era. However, Nemukhin is far from journalistic sociality. His artistic world is infinitely far from the world outside the window. His game is not about money and greedy excitement, but about the desire to comprehend the essence of the world through evolving combinations.
And sometimes the brand name does not immediately catch the eye. So, for example, in the late assemblage "Still Life with tracing paper" we first see black stickers covered with translucent paper, and only under one of them is a map glued (face up). And it already reads like the author's signature. Or another example: "Composition with an old bucket" (2007). A metal product with a handle is flattened into a single pancake. And it is this unusual solution that attracts attention, and not the clubs and spades scattered to the right and left. While remaining faithful to a motive he once found, Nemukhin, however, uses it as freely as possible.
Win in life
Bucket work is from the collection of the AZ Museum, which has formed one of the best nonconformist collections in the world. And here the institution's contribution is great: it's not just about the works provided (the mentioned example is by no means the only one), but also about Natalia Volkova, the chief curator of AZ. The overall spirit of the project, the approach to choosing the material, is really close to what we usually see in her native space. Technically, there are not a lot of things, but everything adds up to a three-dimensional picture of creativity. And, most importantly, the level shown is consistently high.
So the "Game of abstraction" — that's the name of the Tretyakov Gallery exhibition — pleases with the absence of passing, optional works. And even a block of graphics, by definition more modest, turns out to be as good as painting in terms of clarity reflecting the artist's evolution, showing the way from the expressive vivid "Urban Landscape" (1961) to the suprematist philosophical "Jack of Diamonds. Day – night" (2000).
Nemukhin lived for 90 years. And for at least the last quarter of a century, his art has been more than in demand, recognized, and loved. During the author's lifetime, many card compositions settled in the largest Russian and foreign collections. So if we consider his fate to be a game, Nemukhin definitely won it. And yet the main winners are the audience. As times change, so do the layouts, and Nemukhin's parties are still fascinating. The Tretyakov retrospective is proof of this.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
