Pictures of Igor Cherry based on illustrations for the Russian relic "The Tsar Book"

YEKATERINBURG. In the framework of the project, called “Russian Style”, developed by Igor Vishnya, an artist who now lives in St. Petersburg, the personal art exhibition “The Alphabet of the Sacred” has been launched at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The exposition of the exhibition is composed of paintings by Igor Vishnya, the basis of which was an appeal to miniatures that became illustrations for the brightest monument of Russian art - the Facial Annalistic Code. Created in the middle of the sixteenth century, a national relic called the Tsar Book consists of 10 thousand sheets and 17 thousand miniatures, over which 10 artists and 15 scribes worked.

This unique work describing world history is a multi-volume encyclopedia in which colorful miniatures are not only wonderful illustrations, but also give it completeness. For the exhibition, the artist picked up reproductions of 10 miniatures with historical subjects and supplemented them with his own works. The subject of 14 paintings, painted in oil on canvas, is diverse.

Some of them are written in a little-known manner characteristic of Russian painting of the sixteenth century, and are the author’s version of reading the plots of the Tsar Book. The other part is a kind of polemic between the author and Kazimir Malevich. Some are full of Igor Cherry and offer viewers the opportunity to independently reflect on what they see.

The artist himself believes that this exhibition should recall the presence of his own, little-studied, original culture. It is the Annalistic Facial Arch, according to the artist, that is the foundation for transforming Old Russian art into contemporary art.

Ludmila Trautmane