Comfort me with capricious Chopin
With sober Brahms...
Osip Mandelstam
Sometime at a concert hall, in recollection,
A Brahms intermezzo will wound me…
Boris Pasternak
The 19th International Arts Festival “Art-November” is dedicated to Johannes Brahms, whose oeuvre and name are inextricably connected to Vienna. As part of the Festival, ASTI Gallery is hosting its “Moscow-Vienna-Moscow. Impressions of Vienna” exhibition in the halls of the State Institute of Art Sciences. These impressions are brought to us by a unique quintet of well-known artists – the “soloists”, Alla Bedina, Svetlana Lanshakova, Lyubov Lesokhina, Olga Lisenkova and Alexander Dragovoy, are all participants in the ambitious international project “Austria through the Eyes of Contemporary Russian Artists” (Österreich – aus dem Blickwinkel russischer zeitgenoessischen Meister der Malerei), which was launched two years ago by the ALLRUS Gallery.
Each of our exhibitors – artists of the ASTI Gallery circle – has a distinctive artistic personality, a signature style, as well as unique vision and world view. For all of them, the experience of working en plein air in Vienna and the Austrian Alps became an inspiration to create paintings and drawings through which they express (and communicate to the viewer) their delight in the enchanting musical and artistic capital of Europe, and the surrounding landscapes of Austria.
In this quintet of artists, everyone is a soloist, everyone carries his or her own tune, and everyone shows us her or his “own”, “personal” Vienna and Austria. This is the core creative component of the exhibition which we present to the guests of the “Art-November” festival. It is important to us to show how different and diverse artistic concepts and their implementations can be, ranging from the discrete and fragmented to the concrete and generalized. Each artist has a unique way of representing space-time correlations – from capturing the fleeting moment in time to complete rejection of hic et nunc.
The viewer sees Vienna and Austria precisely through the eyes of these truly creative individuals, whose visual and emotional perception is sharpened, like the hearing of a musician with a perfect pitch. Intoxicated with the joyous Vienna, with its architecture, so justly compared to music set in stone, and to use Mandelstam’s words, “pampered by the music of light” in the Alps, the painters gave free reign to their remarkable passion for colour, while the graphic artists seemed unable to keep up with the motion of their uninhibited hand, as it submits to their admiring gaze.
“The Vienna Quintet of Artists” gives us the quintessential image of Vienna and Austria, the image which is laid out in five separate solo melodies. At the same time, it is a preview of a large exhibition to be presented to the sophisticated Viennese public at the end of 2013.
Natella Voiskunski
Curator of the exhibtion "Impressions of Vienna"
Art Director of "Art-November"
To read the detailed information in pdf (3,7 Mb., 18 pages) please click on the link from the picture bellow or find under the link.