Alexander Petrov. All-in-one 18+

Erarta Museum presents an exhibition of the artist Alexander Petrov, whose expressionist painting conveys the spirit of the times and the energy of the eternal struggle of life and non-existence

• Bright, recognizable, aggressive works
• Combining the primal energy of color with the correct composition
• Endless confrontation between man and beast, man and man, human and natural

The exhibition of Alexander Petrov in the Erarta Museum, uniting the works of the artist’s most active creative period, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, continues the cycle of exhibitions devoted to the history of modern art in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Despite his academic education, and partly thanks to him, by the beginning of the 80s Petrov had formed as a modern artist. He managed to develop an individual, recognizable style in which the primitive energy of color is combined with the correct composition. The author is characterized by a combination of simple and precise, like neolithic petroglyphs, forms with the experience of expressionist art of the 20th century. Here chaos and epos meet, but there is still no ethics or mythology - there is an endless war between man and beast, man and man, human and natural.

The artist is far from any kind of literary and momentary sociality - he seems to plunge into the depths of irrational memory, turns to archetypal motives. Generalized to plastic formulas, people-signs in his works make eternal plots of domination, struggle for survival, procreation. According to Petrov, this always happens, be it the era of primitive hunters or the wonderful time of artistic plein-airs. Here is the visualization of basic instincts, and the cry of existential hopelessness, and the pulsation of life.

Petrov’s painting can be compared with a hieroglyph, in which the content, the plastic, and the emotional side are important. The energy of meanings, generalized lines, active, almost spectrally pure colors and laconic compositions turn the author’s works into force fields, into clots of despair, into an imprint of the eternal struggle of life and nothingness. And in every person, this struggle unfolds for broke.

about the author

Alexander Petrov (1951-2009) - a prominent figure in the St. Petersburg art scene of the era of change, a member of the alternative creative association "SPASI" (St. Petersburg Academy of Contemporary Art), a participant in many domestic and foreign exhibitions. Graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. I.E. Repin (workshop of Andrey Mylnikov). The author’s works are presented in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art and other public and private collections in Russia, Europe and North America.