Black water. Exhibition of Mikhail Zvyagin

Mikhail Zvyagin is one of the oldest Leningrad-Petersburg artists (even though he now lives in New York), who in his own way reflected the time from the beginning of the 1960s to the beginning of the 2000s.

A feature of Zvyagin is his non-mainstreamness, non-belonging to any collective creative strategies. He is neither right nor left. He is a lonely artist. His painting, especially the work of the 60s, is an extremely individual experience and evidence of reality, far from the standard agenda of both official and non-conformist art. In his works of that time, one can feel the bitter air of the suburbs, factory outskirts, red-brick factory buildings on white snow and black winter water. At the same time, plastic, rhythmic, coloristic - it is very balanced, even contemplative, which allows drawing distant parallels with N. Lapshin and A. Vedernikov painting, existing outside the dominant social and artistic ideology.

The factory suburbs of Zvyagin are not a conviction, not mournful insensibility, but rather a kind of contemplative and poetic documentary, accurate and concise, born at the same time as the poems of the early I. Brodsky.

Another section of the exhibition is the late expressionist painting and sculpture of Zvyagin, reflecting the drama of the 90s. The works of this period depict grotesque characters of that time, agony, a catastrophe atmosphere, developing into apocalyptic visions. The artist is keenly experiencing what is happening. “I am writing what I see and what I think. My paintings are not for the faint of heart. This is my cry of the soul, I want to reach out to people’s hearts… What is happening around is bestiary, carnival masks, buffoonery and mummers. Freaks rule the ball. But for how long? We live in the looking glass where we are told one thing, we see another, and something else happens. Around demons and masks… Look, think, listen to the hum of the era. My canvases are mirrors of the world around me, of our time. I am just a witness of my time and I am trying to express it with the means of my art… ”(Mikhail Zvyagin,“ Instead of Biography ”).