On October 15, 2021 at the international Altmans Gallery in the "Vremena Goda" Galleries there was opened «I am what I am ..." exhibition featuring female portraits. There were a lot of guests to attend the opening, including Alena Deryabina, Oygul Musakhanova, Denis Von Meck, Svetlana Kulbatskaya, Anna Rukina, Anna Bebekina, Janine Arnoldi Zikh, Daniil Kupsin, Kira Altman, Yulia Levina. After the official part, within which the founder of the gallery Yegor Altman, the collector Alexander Dobrovinsky, the Ambassador of Israel Alexander Ben Zvi as well as the curator of the exhibition Alexei Petukhov, welcomed the guests. The guests were in for a pleasant surprise: the picture of Marc Chagall of 1956 was raffled off among the guests. The painting went to the President of the TWIGA communication agency Alexander Ohanjanyan.
A high level of interest in the exhibition makes perfect sense: this time, the Altmans Gallery decided to go beyond its own selection of works created by the greatest artists of the 20th century, and invited over Moscow collectors Alexander Dobrovinsky and Georgy Fedorovich, who share a common interest in the art of this very era. The curator of the project is Alexei Petukhov, Ph.D. in art history, senior official of the The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
The name of the exhibition project in the Altmans Gallery makes a line from one of the most romantic poems by the French poet of the mid-20th century, Jacques Prevert. It recalls the highly complex as well as dynamic nature of the images of women in European art of the previous century, the time when the masters of successive innovative artistic movement made their radical discoveries based on the eternal motives of female beauty, in harmony with the freedom-loving and liberated nature of their models.
The chamber exposition is housed in the Vremena Goda Galleries, a space familiar to the guests of the gallery, which this time contains several sections. As a prelude to the exhibition has served a series of engravings based on Edgar Degas' monotypes “Conversations of Getters”, emphasized by Pierre Bonnard, “the last impressionist” in the art of the twentieth century.
What coming up next is the search for classical harmony, " bringing back order" in the art of the interwar twenties, joining together the leading masters of that time - Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, whose rare drawing "Portrait of Madame Dale" makes a significant acquisition of the gallery.
The broad framework of the Paris School in the 1910s - 1950s absorbed masters from all over the world. At the exhibition we do our best to try to recreate the atmosphere of mutual influences and interactions, which involve such indispensable heroes of artistic Montparnasse as Moise Kisling, Serge Ferat, Man Rey, Tsuguharu Fujita, Francisco Bores, André Boden, as well as the well-known and influential German-speaking masters in Paris Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Paul Klee, and even the Indo-Chinese artist Alix Eme.
After World War II, many leading French artists chose the South of France as their residence. Together with them, the exhibition attendees will move from Paris to the Cote d'Azur, where they will be excited by fancy-free decoupage by Matisse, the simplified style of the late Picasso, as well as the romantic graphics of Chagall. The afterword of the exhibition is one of the Marilyn Monroe’s portraits by Andy Warhol. It feels like taking us back from the serenity of the Mediterranean to the vibrant rhythm of a modern city.
Most of the fifty or so works presented at the exhibition are graphic ones. Drawing is the most natural and liberated kind of art, whimsical, capricious, resistant to falsehood and seeming deceptively simple. Therefore, the name of the exhibition makes also recognition of the strength, harmony and freedom of the art language, which is crystal clear to everyone.
Exhibition Dates: October 16, 2021 - December 26, 2021
Venue: Galleries "Vremena Goda", 3rd floor
