An Artistic Triumvirate. The dramatic and festive image of Russia in the work of Tatyana Nazarenko and Alexei and Igor Novikov

Sergei Orlov

Article: 
A LIFE IN ART
Magazine issue: 
#4 2019 (65)

Tatyana Nazarenko, Alexei Novikov and Igor Novikov are members of the Russian Academy of Arts, their artwork reflecting the momentous, transformative processes, trends and events of Russian art of the closing 20th and emerging 21st century. They share a creative credo, artists of European calibre who are entirely rooted in Russian culture: their art represents the many dimensions of Russia, etching out the contours of the modern world.

The essence of their internal unity, as well as the energy of their dialogue and mutual support, clearly shows itself in the careful staging of their exhibitions together, in the layout of their displays. There have been a number of such joint projects, in the galleries of France and Switzerland, the museums of Plyos and Voronezh. Their latest major such show, titled “Life as a Metaphor", ran in June and July 2019 in the Museum of 20th and 21st Century St. Petersburg Art in Russia's northern capital, some 150 works in all, across the genres of painting and graphic works, from the trompe I'oeil figures of Tatyana Nazarenko to the wooden sculptures of Alexei Novikov.

Their allegiances more than merely artistic - Alexei and Igor are father and son, Tatyana and Igor husband and wife - Nazarenko and the Novikovs pave the way into a space of global artistic heritage, a storehouse that collects the personal, psychological and artistic experiences of previous eras and generations.

 

The senior artist

Alexei Novikov has always embraced the spirit of the Russian avant-garde: the artists with whom he feels an affinity are Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich.

Alexei Novikov
Alexei Novikov
Photograph

Born in 1931 near the town of Oryol, Novikov pere was conscripted into the navy at the age of 19 and served in the northern oceans as a professional submariner. In his Moscow studio on Chistye Prudy he proudly displays the model that he himself made of the submarine on which he was based for six years. Full of hardships, demanding rigorous self-discipline, fraught with risk, such military service shaped his strong-willed personality.

His family roots lie in Siberia, where his grandfather and great-grandfather had been blacksmiths. The artist recalls how his life came to be what it is today, how after his discharge from the navy he returned home to the Oryol Region, where his brother offered him a prestigious, well-paid job in mining - but Novikov did not feel that it was what he wanted to do. Instead, he felt that he must become a professional artist.

His road took him to Chisinau in Moldavia , renowned for its marvellous nature, its sunny climate, the richness of its light, its fertile soil. At that time the Council of National Economy of the Republic was establishing a new agency for urban improvement - the term “urban design" had not yet appeared in those years - and Novikov was appointed its director. His responsibilities included improving the areas around kindergartens and schools, parks and playgrounds, industrial facilities and civic organizations.

Novikov began a course of study by correspondence at the Art Academy in Riga, then the only institution of higher education in the Soviet Union with a department of design. He devoted all of his free time to creative pursuits and started exhibiting at national exhibitions in 1964, joining the Artists' Union of the USSR in 1969; he moved from Chisinau to Moscow in the early 1970s.

Every summer Novikov would come together with a group of painters to work at the “Senezh" House of Creativity, an artists' boarding house in the Moscow Region. Visitors included artists from all regions and republics of the Soviet Union and it was a place where artistic experience was shared, where professionals engaged in a dialogue with one another. He still has many original photographs that he took at that time, featuring famous artists such as Viktor Popkov, Pyotr Ossovsky and Togrul Narimanbekov.

Alexei Novikov began to make an impact on the cultural scene of the Sixties, one in which the ethnic schools and the original idioms of individual artists figured prominently alongside the “Severe Style", the direction that many prominent artists had chosen. His distinctive artistic vocabulary formed along the lines of Russian primitivism, as seen in a work like “Naked Woman" (1981), with its figure of a nude Russian Venus set against a background of a lovely, bright carpet of fruit and flowers. Appropriately, Novikov dedicated that composition to Mikhail Larionov, to that artist's celebrated “Russian Venus" series.

Drawing on an artistic style that is festive and cheerful, his generously depicted subjects include the “polychromatic" towns and villages of Russia's heartland, locations such as Gorodets, Zaraisk, Tomilino, Sablino and Timonovo. He created a particularly lovely view of Gorodets in the purple light of sunset, its houses and churches seemingly brought together from colourful mosaic.

Alexei NOVIKOV. In Sablino. 1997
Alexei NOVIKOV. In Sablino. 1997
Oil on canvas. 84 × 104 cm. Property of the artist

In Novikov's pictures, the world is somehow suspended in its lightness, with the simplicity almost of a popular print. The artist is keenly sensitive to the emotional states of his human subjects: patient and kind-hearted, they know one another well, they are good neighbours. Life is how it should be, although even among the wonderful hues of such a world, motifs of good cheer and melancholy exist side by side. Lonely peasant women run their modest households, addressing their prayers to the Church. A springtime flower blossoms in a garden, and two peasant women look at such a wonder with amazement and joy. A jolly accordionist virtually soars down a street and, in response, all the windows open. In the sky above the roofs and cupolas of the churches, a rectangular red house - it could be straight out of Malevich - seems to hover.

Alexei NOVIKOV. Spring in the Garden. 1988
Alexei NOVIKOV. Spring in the Garden. 1988
Oil on canvas. 80 × 110 cm. Property of the artist

 

Intimations of apocalypse

Whatever subjects Nazarenko or Alexei or Igor Novikov are drawn to, their works display a strong engagement with the texture of the modern world. They are persistently attracted to reality, to the lives of people with different destinies and characters, people of different ages, from different social groups; they are drawn to the heady currents of activity of the big city, as well as to the quieter life of the countryside.

The world today is composed of many voices, many meanings. It is dramatic, originative and driven to extremes: now, as before, its bold symbol is “The Scream" of Edvard Munch. This is no scream of loneliness, however, but the scream of imagining the world's worst calamities of the 20th century. Igor Novikov created his own version of “The Scream" in his composition “Farewell to Europe" (2007), with its blue disc surrounded by little golden stars, the symbol of the European Union, in a crimson sky enveloped in flames. To the right and to the left of the disc, there are arrow signs with “EXIT" inscribed on them and two white silhouetted figures running away in different directions from the emblem of Europe.

The red-hot tectonic fault of the moment is drawn across the magic crystal of the world's artistic experience. Moments of tragedy and triumph materialize amidst a scenery of the eternal, universal themes of the Bible. Nazarenko's “The Fire in Sodom and Gomorrah" (2013) features a sky ablaze as people run, bare-footed, carrying their belongings in sacks. A woman, turned into a pillar of salt, stands and faces the flames, her face and the gesture of her hands conveying disbelief at what is going on, a mute scream of bewilderment. The pictures in which Nazarenko turned her gaze to the wars and tragedies taking place in Ukraine - “The Sky Ablaze" (2014), “Within Line of Fire", “The Killing of the Little Ones", “Entombment", “The Identification" (all 2015) - seem to articulate the response of the artist to that female figure.

This is a new expressive Bible. Within this zone of fire, of flames and buildings destroyed, fighters and civilians rescue the wounded and mourn the fallen, while mothers wail over the bodies of their dead children. “The Killing of the Infants" is a biblical story in an original rendition based on current events: Nazarenko evokes Pieter Bruegel the Elder's “Massacre of the Innocents" (15651567), her historical prototypes stretching back to the Landsknechts, the mercenary soldiers of 16th century Europe, on their winter rampage through a Dutch village deep in snow.

In “The Identification", the recognition of the dead, Nazarenko depicted herself with Igor Novikov, a couple facing the terrible rigours of history together: they do what they can to help, to relieve the anguish of these people in their loss. As if they are taking part in these events both past and present, they take on the trial, the burden of carrying the Cross of Calvary (in Nazarenko's “Carrying the Cross", 2016).

Igor Novikov's “The Second Coming" (2008) shows Christ in the desert keening the dead, bewailing the scorched, depopulated earth with its dark sky and blood- red streams. An original interpretation of Ivan Kramskoi's “Christ in the Desert" (1872), it is a work distinguished by an absolutely different kind of artistic expressiveness.

 

Novikov fils

Igor Novikov
Igor Novikov
Photograph

Igor Novikov graduated from the Surikov Institute in 1987 and his identity as a non-conformist artist came to be formed during the late 1980s, the perestroika years. He belonged to the community of young artists that came together in a building on Furmanny Lane in Moscow, a place that became almost a symbol of the times: the building itself was earmarked for demolition, its regular residents moved out, but the colony of artists that had settled there grew in size, expanding to some 30 members; gallery owners and purchasers from abroad began to visit.

Novikov worked at Furmanny for several years, helping to organize a 1989 exhibition by the artists of the community; the decision was taken by some of those who visited the show to take it to Warsaw and to publish a catalogue. After Warsaw, the exhibition transferred again, this time to a museum in the town of Martigny in Switzerland. Novikov attended the opening there and signed a contract to work with a local gallery; from 1990 to 1993, he received a UNESCO stipend. He has lived in Switzerland since 1990, although remaining in close contact all the time with Russia: his solo show at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1993 featured 100 works, seven of which were bought by the gallery.

The exhibition “The Front Gate. Against the Current", which opened at the Tseretely Art Gallery at the Academy of Arts in Moscow in December 2018, featured Novikov's composition “The Lacemaker" (2014). In it Novikov engaged with the motif from Vasily Tropinin's famous work of the same name, created in 1823, but offered an original take on its classic theme. The stare of the lacemaker is stern and focused, searching, even piercing, featured against an imagined landscape of Moscow. Two symbolic vertical elements can be seen to left and right, the Kremlin's Ivan the Great Bell-Tower and Spasskaya Tower, both witnesses over the centuries to Russia's unfolding destiny, the course of its history.

Novikov's inexhaustible “The Bible" is based on classic European paintings: he engages with the works of Russian and European painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, drawing widely on classic images, from Kramskoi, Levitan and Repin to Munch and Rene Magritte. Having selected an image, he makes a loose copy of it (it might be called a “version"). The painter thus creates something like a foundation, a pictorial, emotional environment, “a scenic space". Next Novikov sets in motion the action, inviting his characters to take the floor, and they duly commence their performance, provoking a host of allusions and references.

Igor NOVIKOV. The Scream of Europe. 2008
Igor NOVIKOV. The Scream of Europe. 2008
Oil on canvas. 140 × 100 cm. Property of the artist

Drawing on the tradition of such medieval performances, Novikov uses references in a carnivalesque, in- versive manner. His “New Russians", carrying suitcases, flee from the fields of Levitan's “Golden Autumn"; Ilya Repin's “The Barge Haulers", in two versions, haul a submarine and a warship; a pile of skulls grows out of Vasily Vereshchagin's “The Apotheosis of War", next to which solicitous mothers walk their children. Ivan Tsarevich and Yelena the Beautiful on the Grey Wolf fly out of a Russian fairy tale to a carnival in Europe. The gorgeous references come to life and enter Novikov's carnivalesque circle of metamorphoses. Meanwhile a big Merry-Go-Round starts up on the square, everyone greeted by a large and definitely real Petrushka puppet (from Nazarenko's “New Year's Festivities at the Kremlin", 2016).

Igor NOVIKOV. Golden Autumn. 2004
Igor NOVIKOV. Golden Autumn. 2016
Oil on canvas. 95 × 130 cm. Property of the artist

Novikov has found his “envoys", his witnesses and messengers; they walk, run or fly from one painting to another, pilgrims of perennial stories. People who are masks, people “supremos", people-algorithms; silhouetted, symbol-like figures as universal as mathematical symbols. By force of the magic of creativity they concentrate scores of meanings within themselves; they adapt with equal ease to the present moment, to the past, and to the virtual world of the history of art.

The two main such “supremos" are groups clad in red and in white. Like two universal elements, they oscillate freely and widely on a swing of variable circumstances.

Such characters-cum-masks are adepts of pantomime and collective action. Arraying themselves in rows, they comment on what is going on with gestures: they raise their arms, calling for help for those whose homes have been ruined by the high water (“Flood", 2016) or urging people to return to their deserted, forgotten native lands (“The Remote Places of Russia. The Force of Gravity", 2016).

The attributes of these symbol-like characters are watering cans, rakes, spades and saws. The objects most in demand are red extendable ladders. Contrasting associations interact with each other; the angels from Jacob's ladder, the New Hope, the Expulsion into Paradise, the fabulous thirst to achieve the impossible, the illusory. But the main motif is the individual's life journey, the ascent.

This trio of artists exhibited together at the Russian Museum exhibition “Karl Marx Forever?" (October 2018-January 2019). It turned out that for most participants in the project Marx would prove an attractive hero. Igor Novikov depicted him in a navy officer's uniform, the chevrons on his left sleeve indicating re-enlistments. Three chevrons are due when a person has enlisted thrice, serving for 15 years. Marx's four chevrons attest to his special status: he is a Commander, a helmsman navigating the stormy, reef-ridden ocean of life. Red ladders grow behind Marx and extend out of a slit in his chest. People in red climb up them towards the skies.

A recurring symbolic object for Novikov, the Moscow Kremlin is almost an animate, beautiful creature in the artist's work. He has been creating images of this place, so crucial to the life of Russia, for nearly 30 years, since the beginning of perestroika, from the era of Mikhail Gorbachev. His Kremlin is infinitely diverse: the artist showcases its sweeping panoramas, seen from high vantage points, from different sides, and at different angles. The Moscow Kremlin is a hallowed place, a place where things eternal and immutable dominate absolutely over the transient and fortuitous. Using expressive visuals, Novikov brings into focus the Kremlin's great mystical and protective core.

 

Prima inter pares

Tatyana Nazarenko
Tatyana Nazarenko
Photograph

Tatyana Nazarenko graduated from the Surikov Institute in 1968: her mentors there had been Alexei Gritsai and Dmitry Zhilinsky, and she went on to work at Gely Kor- zhev's workshop at the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts. She came into her own as an artist during the watershed period of the early 1970s. That period, and the years that followed, are called the “long Seventies" because those artistic trends continued into the 1980s: it was a time emblematic in the context of the Soviet era, one which, it seemed then, would last forever.

Nazarenko was the first to assert an artist's right to doubt, to question truths that had become commonplace, articulating the right of the creative individual to an alternative vision of history, an independent opinion about modern life, about the purpose of creative work. Back in those days, which remain so recent, artists could express their independent stance only by association and metaphor. And it was such decisive circumstances that stimulated the search for complex compositional arrangements within multi-levelled orbits of meaning.

The memory of culture rebounded: a compelling landscape of epic proportions opened out, one which took in the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque, the Art Nouveau; Bosch, the Bruegels, both Cranachs. The memory of culture brought back an artist's right to play, to carnival and to the grotesque, the right to revive memories of people with tragic destinies, the slandered, those who died before their time.

Nazarenko's documentary series “A Family Album" dates from the current decade, although its imagery has penetrated and encompassed all of her artwork. It is there like some insuperable burden, the core of her multi-dimensional world. Drawing on the tragic ordeals that befell her own family, Nazarenko recreates the image of a terrible era in which the innocent were destroyed, memory was wiped out, and fear was all-pervasive. “Have been taken from the train, sentenced by the troika judges, got 10 years without right to correspondence. I'm being transported I don't know where. Make your plans without account of me. Kisses to everyone. Nikolai." This scrunched-up message, tucked into the mailbox, was the last note received from her grandfather Nikolai, who was arrested in 1935, then sentenced to death by firing squad three years later. Tatyana remembers that her grandmother did not believe that he was dead and waited for him all her life, and how she used to say that walls had ears, too. “The Last Letter" (2010) features seven men waiting silently as they confront their destinies: one of them is the condemned Nikolai, guiltless.

Everything is quickly forgotten, although there are things that stay in the memory for life: an irreplaceable loss, a life criminally snatched away.

Tatyana NAZARENKO. Pugachev. 1980
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Pugachev. 1980
Oil on canvas. 180 × 300 cm
© Tretyakov Gallery

Nazarenko's paintings have become part of art history. Her first famous piece is “Pugachev" (1980), whose characters are portrayed without heroic idealization, as people with deep inner scars. The tragic overlaps with the mundane. The soldiers escort the arrested Yemelyan Pugachev in a wooden cage, Alexander Suvorov at the head of the procession on his horse, somehow at a loss. Was that how the scene was in reality? More probably Suvorov kept himself at a respectful distance from the arrested rebel, but the painting brings the two figures together, close by one another. They are not enemies - they are side by side - but they seem to exist on different planes. The Will of History keeps them both under its stern thumb. There are no heroes and villains here: military leaders and rebels, nobles and peasants find themselves caught up in equal measure by the tragic circumstances that engulf them.

Nazarenko creates her own myth, her pictorial universe, one where paradise and hell, and reality, carnival and mystique come together. It has its own burden of fears, ordeals, troubles, and the miracle of resurrection, of deliverance from extremity. St. Christopher delivers all from all such burdens: he is a giant who conveys people across the stream of rushing time. Nazarenko's Christopher, a powerful presence, is fording a river; he assists someone who looks like an artist, the image maybe of some Silver Age poet.

Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Repast. 1992
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Repast. 1992
Oil on canvas. 150 × 180 cm. Property of the artist

In the series of lithographs “People-Animals" (1995) the artist has her own messengers-cum-envoys - tiny figures, a man and a woman, the size of porcelain statuettes, delicate as fine china. Tatyana features such miniature characters climbing into traps, finding themselves surrounded by gigantic sabre-toothed monsters. These monsters are ready to tear these little porcelain folk to pieces, but they are more interested in the master herself, in testing her strength, her weakness. The promoter of the infernal repast demands that THE MASTER undertake single combat! And Nazarenko carelessly walks into the deadly circle. She pictures herself on the table, surrounded with infernal looking characters masquerading as vultures (“The Repast", 1992). And look - the meal is forbidden! The mystic trial has been passed, the ritual of initiation into the masters satisfactorily performed. And behold, the miserable, grotesque creatures - a wolf puppy, a Lilliputian jester - are already begging to be healed, begging the magic queen to lift the spell from them with her arm (“The Queen's Arm", 2018).

Tatyana NAZARENKO. Salome I. 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Salome I. 2015
Oil on canvas. 200 × 80 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Salome I. 2013
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Salome II. 2013
Oil on canvas. 200 × 80 cm. Property of the artist

Lo and behold, two Salomes, two sisters, each a mirror image of the other, are already solemnly carrying two platters with severed heads. That tragic story of Salome that became a cornerstone of European art of the modern age, of recent times: every great master has addressed it. Then above the Salomes, so high above the roofs, hovers the myth of the female acrobat, the naked woman warrior endowed with unusual power, a tightrope walker, though one balancing without a rope: “Circus on the Square" (2012) is Nazarenko's self-portrait.

The swirl of the masquerade goes beyond the space of the painting, out from its frame, to fill the full three dimensions of space. Nazarenko designed such a composition-in-space - “Moscow Table" (1997), a large surface on which plywood objects of magic cross one another in a densely packed, multi-coloured roundelay, to be placed and replaced at will. She combines the art of installation with that of the shop sign, advertising in images with the theatre of the streets.

The modern world, so driven to extremes, so absorbingly interesting... Where is the carnival most brilliant - in Russia, Venice, or in Switzerland? Tatyana Nazarenko has chosen all three carnivals, and how spectacular, how populous they are, opening a way into the world of creativity, of play, of magic!

What is the secret of Nazarenko, from where does her creative power emerge? From the bouquets of white lilies perhaps, vast and sprawling like the tree of the world? In “The Empyrean Night" (2015) the artist depicted herself and Igor, little people who have found a cosmic truss of white lilies. The evangelism of light, amidst the soundlessness of the universe!

This trio of artists, Nazarenko, Novikov pere et fils.... In their art, their exhibitions together, the multifarious yet organic image of our modern world - documentary, dramatic and festive - shines through.

On the eve of their 2019 exhibition at the Museum of 20th and 21st Century St. Petersburg Art in Russia’s northern capital - a show held together with the third member of this established triumvirate, Alexei Novikov - Tatyana Nazarenko and Igor Novikov talked with the “Tretyakov Gallery Magazine”. The range of subjects that they touched on proved broad indeed, across art and history - the past, present and future, both of their own artistic careers and collaborations, and of contemporary Russia.

Somehow symbolically, the meeting took place at Nazarenko's studio on Moscow's Bryusov Lane. With its enormous windows looking towards the very centre of Moscow, the space inevitably brings to mind the artist's celebrated 1978 painting, “An Evening in Moscow". It proved a fitting location in more ways than one. As Nazarenko remembers, “I have always loved, I have always been inspired by this view. Truth be told, today many old houses, and the view of the Kremlin itself, are being obstructed by new buildings, but overall, the panorama remains the same. As for the old landscape, it lives on in that painting."

Sergei Orlov: To start with the exhibitions that you stage together... Igor, your schedule is extremely demanding - two or three shows a year. You work together on projects both in Russia and Europe; you are in motion all the time, your creative process is rigorous.

Igor Novikov: We came up with the idea of such exhibitions long ago. I remember how Tatyana worked on our show “HE & SHE" at the Shchukin Gallery in Paris in 2017.[1] We showed our work together right in the heart of Paris, and what a location, in a park! The owner of the gallery is descended from the Shchukins, that famous family of art collectors. An exhibition of the Shchukin and Morozov collection had taken place there, too. French television crews came to the opening, as did Oleg Tselkov,[2] who had his photograph taken in front of our works - he wanted to exhibit there there after us. We printed a catalogue: we try to publish such catalogues, in a modest edition of 300-400 copies, for all our shows.

A year before that we held an exhibition in Zurich. Three of us participated that time - my father, Tatyana and I. We work with a gallery in the centre of Zurich, where we have showed our work three or four times before; we printed a booklet “‘Russian Seasons' - Three Artsts’’.

S.O.: Juxtaposition is the most interesting part of collaboration...

I.N.: Indeed it is: we understood that when we were preparing for our exhibition in Voronezh in 2018. Our collaborations are always natural. Tatyana had a major show at the Kostroma Museum in 2016,[3] and then another one in Plyos, at the Museum of Landscape Painting there. My father and I were later invited to show our work in Plyos, and for that exhibition I created a series of paintings that I titled “Levitan" [in honour of Isaak Levitan, the renowned Russian landscape painter, who was also closely connected to Plyos, and worked there], reflecting my perspective on what is going on in Russia today. Floods devastate villages, they leave people with nowhere to shelter. The “New Russians" flee the country with their suitcases of cash. My “Vesper Bells" represents Russia. Levitan saw it in one way, I see it differently - after all, I live and work in the present. There are so many interesting subjects to tackle! I am following in the footsteps of the Russian non-conformist artists, I am carrying on the artistic tradition that took shape in the 1980s, the era that defined me as an artist. Sometimes people tell me, “You are making fun of Russia." No, I am not making fun of Russia, I just ask questions. If you say that everything is great, it is you who are making fun of Russia!

Of course, not everything here is so great at all. Why just talk about Moscow? Moscow is what it is, but there are all sorts of things happening in other regions of Russia. One should never judge life in that wider Russia by the habits of those who live in the centre of its capital.

Tatyana Nazarenko: One example from our visit to Plyos. The director of the wonderful Isaak Levitan Museum[4] gave us a tour. They are doing so well, with foreign visitors arriving from the river cruises. But the museum in Ivanovo,[5] just 40 minutes away by car, is not. I went there because they have two of my works. We went into the museum and were simply shocked: such desolation... cracks in the walls and. a really very good collection.

O.S.: Igor, I have to ask you about your latest works, their connection to classical art.

T.N.: Everything he does has something of the “classics" in them – Van Gogh, Modigliani, Picasso, Magritte.

I.N.: I painted “The Scream" from Munch's masterpiece, back in 2007, long before Brexit; I called the painting “Farewell, Europe!". I also reworked Vereshchagin's famous “Apotheosis of War" - my work is titled “Apotheosis of War, or Give Birth to More Little Children". I painted [Vera] Mukhina's [monumental sculpture] “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" when the sculpture had been taken away for restoration: that famous couple was away for quite a while.

T.N.: I remember how dazzled everyone was when the monument came back to its formidable pedestal.

I.N.: I painted “A Kremlin Gift" - Crimea. It is based on Aivazovsky's famous painting “Russian Squadron in the Sevastopol Raid" from 1846. You see the bay as it was then. I painted the story of Alexander Suvorov [the great Russian general and military commander] conquering, “opening up" Crimea to the Russians, but then Nikita Khrushchev gave it away. Today, the time is right, it has become Russian again. Hence Suvorov, with his “tin opener", and Khrushchev with his infamous shoe... It was a prophetic painting, and it was immediately acquired from the 2008 exhibition.

Nobody knew back then that there was a crisis looming in Ukraine. In 2010, I painted a composition, “It Is Hot in Moscow", and I gave it a yellow and blue background, the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

S.O.: What of the human silhouettes in your compositions, then?
I.N.: I came up with them when Malevich, Kandinsky and Magritte were “coming back" [to be officially displayed again in Soviet museums, in the late 1980s], during the time when I was part of the colony of artists known as “Furmanny Pereulok",[6] in Moscow. At first I painted them as three-dimensional, but eventually they turned into picto- grams. I liked them better this way - they became more like icons, both oracles and beautiful angels. The colour red does not mean that they have anything to do with the Bolsheviks.

S.0.: You had an exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery...

I.N.: Yes, there was a solo show at the Tretyakov, in the Krymsky Val building, in the same space where Edik Shteinberg[7] showed his works in 1992. Sasha Smeliansky - then art-director of the Manezh - helped Edik organize a large solo exhibition in Switzerland, where I was already working from 1990. So we collected all the materials and the Swiss published them. Edik and I agreed, and he suggested that “we go to the Tretyakov [Gallery] and help you quickly arrange an exhibition as well." So we went to [Nina] Divova[8] and [Lydia] Iovleva[9]: she was the acting director back then. They looked at my works and said: yes. Everything looked very interesting to them, and they gave us the green light. The exhibition took place in 1993, more than 100 works, and the Tretyakov Gallery acquired seven of them.

S.0.: Tatyana, you never confine yourself to classical forms; you create three-dimensional installations, cut-out cardboard figures, volumetric objects from spray foam.

T.N.: I do not know any other artist here who uses spray foam like that to make such spatial works. It is absolutely, so absolutely difficult. Look at this work, “Explosion". I wanted to preserve the terrifying texture, without smoothing it out, so that the explosion would be frightening. Everything I make, I sculpt with my own hands.

S.0.: It does look terrifying, but it draws one in; it does not repel, but attracts, in a grotesque kind of way.

T.N.: The sensibilities of people have changed so dramatically. Today it is the frightening, monstrous things that are the most attractive, murder scenes and such like. Children play scary computer games with gunfights, all sorts of freaks and monsters.

S.0.  : But then people used to go to watch executions, too?

T.N.: Yes, they flocked to watch executions, but there was no such tool of industrial-scale psychological influence as television then. Yesterday I stayed up late, watching to two in the morning, a film about a 14-year-old girl who kept saying, “I was killed." There she was, hovering between earth and heaven. The whole film was about the search for her killers. Thank God, they did not show the murder itself, I could not have watched that.

S.0.  : These films and bloody images invade our memories, our psyche: it is very hard to rid ourselves of them later.

T.N.: That is so true. I created my own murder saga in those works that were shown in Moscow at the Russian Academy of Arts,[10] the ones that will now be exhibited in St. Petersburg.

The situation in Ukraine has always worried me terribly. I remember my 2011 exhibition at the Kiev Museum of Russian Art. The opening of the show fell on my birthday; there were a lot of journalists there, many artists came, and many people came even from Moscow! The mood was happy, welcoming. Journalists asked me if I planned to go to Cherkassy, the small town where my grandmother was born - some of my works from my series “A Family Album" at the exhibition were devoted to her.

I would have never thought that anything could happen there the following year. Later everyone said: “Tatyana, didn't you see their attitude [towards Russians]?" And I answered: “I didn't see anything bad. Everything was perfectly nice."

And my work was so well received...! The best press reaction that I ever received was in Ukraine. Even though my family name is Ukrainian, everyone knows that I am a Russian artist.

And what was so interesting. My birthday is on the 24th, and we celebrated on a river boat, with a gypsy chorus; the weather was beautiful. On the 25th, we woke up to a wall of rain. It felt simply unreal. We walked around Kiev, we visited the Lavra [monastery] and the churches, all in the pouring rain. The storm somehow instantly washed away the wonderful feeling of life's beauty. And then. what happened in 2014 and 2015.

I was flying over Ukraine when it all started, and we saw from far above the lights on Maidan Square in Kiev, like burning coals left over from a campfire. All that space. Kiev, the burning red coals. a bone-chilling feeling of trouble to come, of fear.

Later, after a while, you know how it happens: people quickly get used to everything, they forget everything, and so on. “What are you talking about, Tatyana, everything is very good, perfect," one lady tells me (she lives between Moscow, Paris and Bulgaria). She cannot even imagine what's going on. A lot of people do not want to know, it does not interest them.

Back in 1996 I had an exhibition at the Central House of Artists, it was titled “Underpass". A woman started shouting: “This is disgusting! Where did she see people like this? Beggars like this?" I thought: “For crying out loud! To see people like this, all you have to do is go down into the metro, and just look around!"

Or here they are, my veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan...

S.O.: Do you have real life models for all your sculptures?

T.N.: Yes, all of them; this is one with friends of mine, my mother with her little dogs, these boys, too - one of them, my son: and here is my then husband, his self-portrait.

The only thing that I copied were the beggars' signs. They were unbelievable, some even in rhyme. (As a matter of fact, at the time “Stolitsa" (Capital) magazine did a bit of research into who collected the most money, which signs worked better. It published my works back then, and wrote about me, too. That was in 1996.) So they had this project to see which of the beggars' signs worked best. There were all sorts of them, like: “I lost my home", “Money all gone", “Please give!" All sorts of rather long signs. It turned out that the beggar who was given more than everyone else had a sign, “I'm hung over, I need a drink." So all these people, so content they were, could relate to the pain of being hung over, and gave the beggar money.

S.0.: Back then, it was the written word, now it is more often spoken...

T.N.: Oh, certainly, you hear such long stories sometimes. Here are some of my refugees from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with all those children. And over here I have a Soviet veteran from the war in Afghanistan; another [picture] is in America.

More than anything else, I am interested in real life. I actually think that an artist’s mission - this is true about the artists whose work I love - is to leave behind a picture of life, and what a picture it is! When we look at Bosch, we can imagine what wars were like in those days, what terrible events took place, what executions. And Bruegel told us how people lived, even when he painted scenes from the Bible.

I painted this composition, “A Town in Winter" (2018), in many parts: it is in Switzerland now. It depicts a Russian town in the provinces, with all that happens there. It’s winter, and everyone is getting ready to celebrate the holidays that are coming up: they have their bags of groceries; they are drinking, playing, building a make-believe castle out of snowballs. In the middle of it all, I put a scene from “Flight into Egypt" [“Landscape with the Flight into Egypt" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder]. I was reminded of Bruegel, because he transported “Flight into Egypt" into such a cold winter landscape. He did the same with “Massacre of the Innocents", when he painted the poor children in the snow. I have that scene, too. They look like real small people. Why not play around with it, that’s how it could have happened! Why not!?

These days so much research casts doubt on where ethnic groups came from, howthey lived, as well as all the historical dates. Where did all this history come from? Igor’s father, Alexei Ivanovich, is away now, on holiday at Igor’s cottage in a village near Zaraisk, where they have a museum made up of just one piece.

Zaraisk is out there on the very edge of the Moscow Region; it’s known for having the smallest Kremlin in Russia. Archaeologists discovered a figure of a European bison sculpted from mammoth ivory there - mammoth ivory! It's older that all the pyramids of Egypt. When it was shown at the British Museum in London, everyone was in raptures. The hairs on the bison's head were painted, and some traces of that ochre paint are still there, like those on Ancient Greek statues. So it turned out that, once upon a time, there were mammoths grazing in the fields where Zaraisk is now, and the hunters who lived there built the roofs of their homes out of mammoth tusks. Can you imagine? Who could have known! Remember the old joke - that Russia was where elephants came from? It turns out, it's true! It was somewhere there that glaciation stopped. In such a way, everything is being reevaluated. They also found some female sculptures there. The little bison is perfectly palaeolithic, prehistoric.

S.0.: How extraordinary that such fabulous things have survived!

T.N.: Yes, they were excavating next to the Kremlin and found the mammoth bones and female figures. It was no accident that they found all the cave paintings. There is a museum on the way to Monte Carlo, dedicated to those prehistoric paintings that were not preserved in caves, but found on rocks and slates. These paintings depict people dancing, running, jumping, all of that.

S.0.: Tell us about your remarkable trompe I'oeil sculptures...

T.N.: I made the “Female Worker and Kolkhoz Man" monument, five meters tall, and placed it next to the Kutafya Tower of the Kremlin in Moscow; it will be exhibited in St. Petersburg soon. The monument was in the square next to the Manege, there was a big scandal, which always happens with my works. These figures have a very interesting history, quite unusual, like everything that is real art. Anyway, recently Alexei Novikov showed his works at the DiDi Gallery in St. Petersburg. We went there right after the opening of my exhibition at the Academy. We went to the Hermitage to see “Believe Not Thine Eyes", the remarkable exhibition of Ancient Greek trompe I'oeil artefacts, and other pieces. People have always played tricks. There we were on the staircase, looking at an enormous pool of black ink on the floor. You can’t help yourself from stepping away, but it turns out it’s an optical illusion. It’s so convincing - it’s shiny, all sorts of things, too. And then the Greek and Roman trompe I'oeil art... columns that are not actually columns, some sort of foliage... They painted butterflies on bowls, with birds perched on them. There is a well-known story of a competition between artists, with one of them painting a still-life of fruit that was so realistic that it attracted the birds.

For my exhibition in Kuskovo,[11]1 made a bowl with butterflies painted on it. Back then I couldn’t model such work, today I can create butterflies like that, but at the time I did not know anything about ceramics.

I was introduced to art at the Kuskovo Estate Museum - they have this figure of a girl with a watermelon there.[12] When I first saw it, I was absolutely transfixed: it was just my kind of thing. Later on, in 1996,1 was preparing my exhibition at the Central House of Artists, where they gave me two huge halls: I made 120 cut-out figures for the installation that I called “Underpass".

Every underpass in Moscow had its distinct character. The one under Pushkin Square was crowded, there were always so many people, selling things and begging, lots of punks. As for the underpass at Lubyanka, that was a kind of kingdom of the blind: the entire space filled with blind musicians with their accordions and balalaikas, playing tear-jerker Russian songs. Do you remember how many small “orchestras" played by the Revolution and Manege Squares, and next to Kutafya Tower? (There is an underpass there, too.) They were all accomplished professional musicians who were there trying to make money, because they had to live, to survive somehow. Crowds gathered, and people gave them money. But how much? Someone would throw them 20 kopecks, someone else would give 20 rubles, but not more than that.

Tatyana NAZARENKO. General view of the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. General view of the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height of figures - 100-180 cm. Property of the artist

People's faces, their essence, their clothes - all these things fascinate me. I have painted some historical pieces, but they were all connected with the present. In reality, the moment you are finished painting something, it belongs to history. Thus, I showed my “Underpass" at the Museum of Moscow once, when it was located in the building of a church opposite the Lubyanka. It was a small museum, with glass showcases. They asked me for the things my models wore. I took my mother's roller bag, her felt boots and rain shoes. There was an accordion. From my son, I took a punk leather jacket and all sorts of trinkets. They had a ton of my things there. One day they casually mentioned that they often had exhibitions abroad and used my cut-out figures. After my show I hoped that this would bring me luck and gave them 30 to 40 of my cut-out figures as a gift, as well as those other cultural things - but nothing ever came back in return.

S.O.: Tell us how you made your first cut-out figure...

T.N.: I used a friend as a model: I just had her lean against the cardboard, I drew the contour, then painted the figure. This was when I thought: “How exciting! If I were to get rid of the rest of the cardboard, I could fit so many figures in!" I wasn't interested in any of the things that surrounded the people - why would I want to paint the marble underpasses? Back then, there weren't even any kiosks to be seen.

The underpasses were one enormous nightmare. You couldn't take photographs there; I had to take notes instead. I would go back up to the street and write it down: “People! Help a homeless man, Give me what you can!" You could even find such appeals in rhyme there. Whole life stories, how many children they had, and everyone asked for money “to buy bread". These days you may see a forlorn old woman or, just like it happened to me yesterday, a young girl, maybe 17: “Found myself in a tough situation, please help me pay for a ticket back home." But this is an exception. What if it is a crowd, all different faces, different ages. There's been a lot in the press about criminal organizations being behind this, how one should not give money to such people. But when you meet someone who is disabled - I painted them, being pushed to their regular begging patches in their wheelchairs - you can see that they really don't have any arms or legs, that someone has to take them everywhere, that they really are destitute, so you give them money, whether there are criminals behind it all or not. I don't care about that, what I want is not to feel sick at heart knowing that I passed someone by and didn't help them. Sometimes I turn around and go back to give to an elderly beggar who looks like my mother. I say to myself: my goodness, how she looks like my mother!

Tatyana NAZARENKO. Сut-out figures for the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Сut-out figures for the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height of figures - 100-180 cm. Property of the artist

So that was how I created “Underpass", which I showed several times around Europe. In Germany, I took the show to Stuttgart and Cologne; in Bonn, we showed it in a real underpass, with an entrance to the Museum of Transport, or something like that, where I “set" my punks. People came and sat down next to them, hugged them, only to see that the figures weren't real They [the public] painted chains on themselves, too. Of course, I can paint it all to look real. In Cologne, we used a simple underpass; another exhibition was at the Cologne railway station, where the cut-outs were placed behind a fence, with an iron mesh added to protect them at night. We showed many cut-out figures there. This exhibition also included some similar works by a graphic artist from Poland, but his were posters.

On the subject of posters - all the posters from my shows are now in my studio. They were all in different places: in Kostroma it was “Molochnaya Gora" [Milk Hills], “Rybnye Ryady" [Fish Merchants' Row]. The installation “My Paris", which has a very different feeling compared to “Underpass", because Paris is full of light, colour, beauty. I showed it in Paris, in the Cite Internationale des Arts, the city's artistic colony, and then took it to the Obninsk Museum of History - they were really excited about having it there. Soon “My Paris" will be going to St. Petersburg.

“Underpass" also went to Washington, D.C. (1998, the National Museum of Women in the Arts), and New York (1997, Lehman College Art Gallery of the City University of New York). A funny thing happened when we took the exhibition to Finland. The Finlandia Hall in Helsinki is an enormous exhibition space. It has all these columns in it, so I put all my beggars, homeless, drunks and the like there. And who was there to open the festival? None other than Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow![13] To cut a long story short, there I was, watching in horror as Luzhkov walked by the crowd, his entourage trying to direct him towards a column with a less offensive, somehow more decent cut-out figure. All the more or less “good-looking" cut-outs that I had there were prostitutes... To avoid them, they ended up taking Luzhkov straight to a cut-out of an amputee, or a veteran of the Afghan war, so there he was, horrified at what he saw. I remember it well, the Finlandia Hall, it was so beautiful.

When I see a lone punk kid, I think of my own son, who at 17 decided to get himself up as one. So like any kind mother who loves her boy, I brought him all sorts of metal trimmings back from my travels. What wouldn't you do for the son you love! The Tretyakov Gallery has my painting “The Street".

The fact is that I was very lucky with that idea. And then, as I always say, its time came to an end. Today, it belongs to history. These ideas remain history, too. Every moment of time, if you can capture it, will one day become history; it is like all the letters I have written over the years. It's different these days, people don't write to each other anymore, they just send texts.

S.0.   : And that's not going to change now...

T.N.: Of course not. My grandfather's letters from his exile were written in beautiful cursive script. It is from those letters that I learned that my mother studied the violin as a small child, as did my aunt. They both did. My grandfather wrote to remind her that it would soon be time to change her small, quarter-size (or whatever it was called) violin for a larger one. He was far away, exiled far from his home, but he remembered what they needed, and remembered to write beautifully. It is very touching. It is not even Chekhovian; it is an intensely personal, sorrowful, very private letter.

Endlessly sorrowful. [He wrote to his wife, my grandmother:] “My Hannah, my dearest, you reproach me because I do not ask you to come to me. You are wrong, I want you with me as much as ever; you have forever filled my life with light." That was it. The end. I will not return to this subject. I had my show at the Academy, and I have moved on. This, too, belongs to history.

S.0.   : Your grandfather died in exile.

T.N.: He was executed. I painted a composition titled “The Last Letter". Someone had dropped this crumpled piece of paper in our mailbox; it read: “Have been taken from the train, sentenced by the troika [three judges], got 10 years without right to correspondence. I'm being transported I don't know where. Make your plans without account of me. Kisses to everyone. Nikolai." He must have given this crumpled note to someone, along with the address. There was nothing else. My grandmother waited for him to come back all her life, until Stalin's death, when many were rehabilitated posthumously. She never believed that he had been executed. Back then nobody knew that a sentence of 10 years without correspondence privileges was actually a death sentence. He was ordered off that train, and that was all. No grave, no resting place, nothing.

There is another story, about Israel and my grandmother's brother, who had gone to live in Palestine. There was an incredible coincidence. He had a son who was killed in the war, in 1942, defending some heights or other. My grandmother's sister also had a son, here in Russia, a student at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, and he was conscripted and killed at the front in 1942, defending his country. So, you can go to the other side of the world, but your fate will be the same. Fate is mystical. I learned that from those letters, too.

It is the same situation with Ukraine. I painted several subjects that were so, so painful to me. Because I could never have imagined that this magnificent place would one day. After the exhibition at the Museum of Russian Art in Kiev, I had another one at the Literature Museum in Odessa. The theme was also “A Family Album", but this time it was all prints, 25 of them.

Odessa is actually a Russian town - everything there is Russian. There was a celebration honouring the “Oktyabr" (October) [literary] magazine. Plenty of Russian writers came, and everyone doted on them. When I think of the fire at the Trade Unions House in Odessa, I cannot believe that something like that could have really happened.

On that subject, I have to talk about my installation “Explosion".

I was three minutes away from where the explosion at Pushkin Square took place[14]. I was just standing there, talking to a friend. She was thinking about going to an exhibition at the Manege, and I was on the way to my studio. We said goodbye, and then two minutes later the explosion went off. She told me that she saw the severed limbs because she was still there, above ground, while I had already gone down into the metro station. We simply can't imagine how things like that can happen, so close to us.

Well, in time all of these things become part of history. Everything becomes history, very fast in fact, and people are in a hurry to forget. That's why occasionally I use my works to remind people of something, things that sometimes happen, things that happened, that will happen again.

 

  1. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s exhibition “Icones de l'Art moderne. La collection Chtchoukine" (Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin Collection) was held in Paris in 2016-2017.
  2. The artist Oleg Tselkov (born in 1934) has lived and worked in Paris since 1977.
  3. Kostroma Museum of Fine Arts.
  4. The Levitan Memorial House-Museum in Plyos, near Ivanovo.
  5. The Burilin Ivanovo Historical Museum in Ivanovo and its exhibition centre in Ivanovo.
  6. During the late 1980s, Furmanny Pereulok (named after the street in Moscow on which the apartment building that it occupied was located, Furmanny Lane) was the loose name of a community of young Soviet non-conformist artists which gathered there.
  7. Eduard Steinberg (1937-2012), a leading non-conformist artist of the 1960s-1980s.
  8. Nina Divova was Head of the Exhibition Department at the Tretyakov Gallery from the late 1980s onwards.
  9. Lydia Iovleva was for many years Deputy Director for Academic Research at the Tretyakov Gallery.
  10. Tatyana Nazarenko's exhibition “Dialogue with the Times" was held at the Russian Academy of Arts, April 17- May 12 2019.
  11. Tatyana Nazarenko and the Kuskovo Museum staged the show “For Happily Would I, Believe Me, Deceive Myself" together in 2002.
  12. Reference to the painting by an unknown 18th century artist “Peasant Girl with a Watermelon" (trompe l'oeil; oil on wood; 157.5 cm x 54 cm)
  13. Yury Luzhkov was Mayor of Moscow, 1992-2010.
  14. There was an explosion, a terrorist act, on August 8 2000 in Moscow, in the pedestrian underpass at Pushkinskaya Square, which connects the Pushkinskaya, Tverskaya and Chekhovskaya metro stations.
Ilustrations
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Woman and the Birds. 2016
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Woman and the Birds. 2016
Oil on canvas. 70 × 61 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. Kremlin Paradise. Happy End. 1994
Igor NOVIKOV. Kremlin Paradise. Happy End. 1994
Oil on canvas. 190 × 135 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. Yellow Sky. 2005
Alexei NOVIKOV. Yellow Sky. 2005
Oil on canvas. 67 × 47 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. Monastery. 1988
Alexei NOVIKOV. Monastery. 1988
Oil on plywood. 58 × 48 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. In Parshino. 2014
Alexei NOVIKOV. In Parshino. 2014
Oil on canvas. 110 × 135 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. Ascension. 1990
Alexei NOVIKOV. Ascension. 1990
Oil on canvas. 80 × 100 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. Harmonica Player in Sablino. 1995
Alexei NOVIKOV. Harmonica Player in Sablino. 1995
Oil on canvas. 104 × 70 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. The Village. 2006
Alexei NOVIKOV. The Village. 2006
Oil on canvas. 80 × 110 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. White Nights. 2017
Alexei NOVIKOV. White Nights. 2017
Oil on canvas. 96 × 87 cm. Property of the artist
Alexei NOVIKOV. In Zaraisk. 1981
Alexei NOVIKOV. In Zaraisk. 1981
Oil on canvas. 43 × 61 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. The Second Resurrection. 2008
Igor NOVIKOV. The Second Resurrection. 2008
Oil on canvas. 100 × 140 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. Golden Autumn. 2016
Igor NOVIKOV. Golden Autumn. 2016
Oil on canvas. 95 × 130 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. Memories of Russia. 2016
Igor NOVIKOV. Memories of Russia. 2016
Oil on canvas. 80 × 130 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. The Kremlin Gift. 2008
Igor NOVIKOV. The Kremlin Gift. 2008
Oil on canvas. 120 × 140 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. Russia. 1991
Igor NOVIKOV. Russia. 1991
Mixed technique, plaster relief. 44 × 32 × 4 cm. Property of the artist
Igor NOVIKOV. Good Fellow. Eden. 2018
Igor NOVIKOV. Good Fellow. Eden. 2018
Oil on canvas. 100 × 70 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Large Window. 1985
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Large Window. 1985
Oil on canvas. 170 × 200 cm
© Perm Art Gallery
Tatyana NAZARENKO. An Evening in Moscow. 1978
Tatyana NAZARENKO. An Evening in Moscow. 1978
Oil on canvas. 160 × 180 cm
© Tretyakov Gallery
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Casket. 2002
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Casket. 2002
Oil on plywood. 40 × 50 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Party. 2019
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Party. 2019
Oil on canvas. 100 × 140 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Game. 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Game. 2015
Oil on canvas. 150 × 120 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Identification (three parts). 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Identification (three parts). 2015
Oil on canvas. 120 × 300 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Women’s Company. Flight. 2018
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Women’s Company. Flight. 2018
Oil on canvas. 150 × 120 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Men with Vodka. Dreams. 2018
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Men with Vodka. Dreams. 2018
Oil on canvas. 150 × 120 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Rape of the Sabine Women. 2017
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Rape of the Sabine Women. 2017
Oil on canvas. 120 × 200 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Carrying the Cross. 2016
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Carrying the Cross. 2016
Oil on canvas. 80 × 100 cm.
Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. In Memory of the Karpinsky Family. 2010
Tatyana NAZARENKO. In Memory of the Karpinsky Family. 2010
Oil on canvas. 120 × 150 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Sisters. 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Sisters. 2015
Oil on canvas. 100 × 120 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Letter from Evacuation. 2010
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Letter from Evacuation. 2010
Oil on canvas. 100 × 100 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Summer in the Village. 2010
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Summer in the Village. 2010
Oil on canvas. 120 × 80 cm.
Property of the artist
Igor Novikov’s “Life as a Metaphor” exhibition
Igor Novikov’s “Life as a Metaphor” exhibition
Igor Novikov’s “Life as a Metaphor” exhibition in the Museum of 20th and 21st Century, St. Petersburg, Art, June-July 2019
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Explosion. 2006
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Explosion. 2006
10-part installation Spray foam, oil on plywood. 300 × 400 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Girls. 2004
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Girls. 2004
Painted foam, oil and enamel on plywood. 233 × 95 cm
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Entombment. 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Entombment. 2015
Oil on canvas. 120 × 200 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Sky Is on Fire. 2014
Tatyana NAZARENKO. The Sky Is on Fire. 2014
Oil on canvas. 70 × 100 cm.
Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Disabled Person Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Disabled Person Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Т.Г. НАЗАРЕНКО. Беженка. Фигура из серии «Переход». 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Woman Refugee Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 100 cm. Property of the artist
Т.Г. НАЗАРЕНКО. Инвалид. Фигура из серии «Переход». 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. A Disabled Person. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 170 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Street Musician. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Veteran of the Afghan War. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Veteran of the Afghan War. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 170 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Beggar. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Beggar. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Newspaper Seller. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Newspaper Seller. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995–1996
Tatyana NAZARENKO. Figure from the “Underpass” installation. 1995-1996
Oil on plywood, timber. Height - 100 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. First Page of the Album. 2010
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. First Page of the Album. 2010
Oil on canvas. 150 × 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. Sisters. 2015
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. Sisters. 2015
Oil on canvas. 100 × 120 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. Fifth Page of the Album. 2010
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “Family Album” series. Fifth Page of the Album. 2010
Oil on canvas. 150 × 110 cm. Property of the artist
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “My Paris” installation. 1998
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “My Paris” installation. 1998
Tatyana NAZARENKO. “My Paris” installation. 1998
Oil on plywood, timber. Height of figures - 140-190 cm. Property of the artist

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