"Inexpressible." Exhibition of works by Elena Surovtseva

In the Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts, an exhibition of works by the honored artist of Russia, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Elena Mikhailovna Surovtseva, opens. The exhibition presents about 50 sculptural works and 11 art objects made in various techniques and materials (wood, chamotte, bronze, etc.), as well as several copyright graphic sheets. Among them are such well-known sculptural compositions as “Inexpressible”, “White Signs”, “Genealogical Tree-People-Stars”, “Everything Is Not As It Seems”, “Nothing Special”, as well as the works “Monument to Mowed Grasses”, “ Envy of bicycle tires ”,“ My muse - 1 ”,“ Sacrifice ”and others.

Elena Surovtseva is a tireless experimenter, a master with a unique individual style. It belongs to the galaxy of leading Russian sculptors - “Octecentals”. Her path in sculpture was peculiar. A taste for the material, for the form of the subject manifested itself during his studies at the department of art glass at the higher Stroganov School. Through material with a fluid, moving form came the experience of creating objects in purely “sculptural” ideas. Another starting point for the formation of the artist’s style was an extraordinary vision of the world.

The sculptor’s formal searches imply a free correspondence with the world history of art, including the glorified heritage of Russian plastic art in the 20th century, and a rethinking of the experience of European modernism, including modernism and expressionism. In recent years, E. Surovtseva has discovered a new understanding of sculpture. The creative experience of the author is of interest not only in the domestic art environment, but also abroad. Her works are in museums in Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, and are also presented in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

In her work, Elena Surovtseva often uses the theme of time, which bears traces of her personal memory, turned to the archaic experience of time and space, when there are no boundaries between internal and external, the world appears as yet unnamed. It harmoniously combines images that are important for a fundamental understanding of history, the universe - archaic figures of prehistoric statuettes of women, classical antique images and symbolic signs. The creative method developed by the artist, which consists in working with geometric structures, deformation, allows you to create the impression of the primordial world, its childishness, as a rare gift of preserving the pristine state of the original state of the soul. The emerging visual images are endowed not only with the canonical stability of the form, but also with the natural form. So Elena Surovtseva allows the viewer to look into the world, not yet loaded with the latest acquisitions of intellectual technologies, and into herself. Plunging into this “sensitive matter”, the viewer moves with the artist, changing the perspectives of his vision, revealing a special topography and its prospects. At the same time, reality itself in this artistic system opens up at the moment of acute experience, like instantaneous flashes of light.

E. Surovtseva works a lot with nudity, exploring the theme of physicality. In the female figure, she seeks to express the deepest sense of the natural element, the pulsation of internal energy. This is manifested in the inclination of the poses of her heroines, in the contours of their silhouettes, somewhat reminiscent of Mayol’s figures beckoning with their magic; they meet the intense female feeling manifested in the compositions of Matisse and Botero, the elevation of the poetics of impressionism, immersion in the Baroque culture of the XVIII century. In chamber compositions Surovtseva hides a deep tenderness for the human body, which can reflect the dramatic world of human habitation. A peculiar artist approaches the portrait genre. In sculptural portraits, she tries to express her thoughts about the incomprehensibility of nature, the loneliness of man in the face of time.

The novelty of Elena Surovtseva’s approach to the plastic task allows you to touch the moral conflicts of the time and make the hidden manifest for modern perception. The reality fixed by the sculptor’s plasticity is the only and genuine stay of a person in a world filled with living consciousness and love. The creative searches of E. Surovtseva allow us to understand the general stylistic process of Russian art of the late XX - early XXI century, in which it occupies one of the prominent places.

The text is based on an article by a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts, art critic Vitaly Patsyukov.