TO THE SUN. ALEXANDER AKILOV

Alexander Akilov is one of the brightest representatives of the modern school of painting. For the first time in Kazan in the halls of the Gallery of Modern Art of the Pushkin Museum of the RT will be presented the work of this master in all its diversity.

Akilov is not only a painter, but also a photographer, author of documentaries.

Wherever the artist is, he invariably narrates his work about Tajikistan. Akilov writes shady streets and courtyards of old Dushanbe, mountain landscapes, villages on the slopes. In his works, the noise of a mountain river, the debate of bright sun glare and harsh shadows, adding their own pattern to the adras of clothes, the twitter of night birds, filling the silence, smooth and at the same time rhythmic music - a reflection of the character of local residents.

The art of Alexander Akilov is meditative. His paintings are an experience related to eternity. In the artist’s works there is no direct statement, software installation. The state, the sensation, caught in what he saw the day before or extracted from distant memories - this is the basis of his works. The master managed to express an oriental understanding of the world, where behind the external forms of the visible world lies an inner, deeper content that is inaccessible to the surface gaze. Alexander Akilov is a delicate painter who masterfully owns color. Perceiving the traditions of Russian and European symbolism, as well as Central Asian decorative and applied art, the artist developed an individual pictorial-plastic language.

Photos of Akilov are no less picturesque and cinematic at the same time. In the series “Dushanbe - Tajikistan 1970-1980” presented at the exhibition, an irrevocably bygone era comes to life. Photographs and fragments of Akilov’s documentary videos are recollections of Soviet Tajikistan, the multinational Dushanbe. In one shot, the artist sometimes fits complex drama, fragments of human destinies. And also Akilov’s photographs are the key to his painting. What can be perceived as fantasy in paintings turns out to be a reality, seen in a special way by the artist and conveyed on canvas.

Alexander Akilov was born in 1951 in the city of Stalinabad (now Dushanbe) of the Tajik SSR.

In 1971 he graduated from the Republican Art College. M. Alimova in Dushanbe (workshop of G. N. Kuzmin).

In 1977 he graduated from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, Faculty of Art (workshop of B. M. Nemensky and V. A. Tokarev).

Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR since 1982 and the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation since 2016.

Member of numerous exhibitions.

The works of Alexander Akilov are kept in museums and private collections in Russia and abroad.

The exhibition will exhibit about sixty paintings by Alexander Akilov of different years, including works written shortly before the opening of the exhibition, from the collections of the Marjani Foundation, Julia Verbitskaya (Linnik) and belonging to the author. A separate part of the exhibition will be devoted to the photographic series "Dushanbe - Tajikistan 1970-1980." Also specially prepared for the exhibition was a film edited by A. Akilov from fragments of documentary filming conducted in Tajikistan in the 1980-1990s.

Project Curator: Maria Filatova.