"Oasis of Nostalgia". Exhibition of works by Alexander Mayorov

The Russian Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of works by the Honored Artist of Russia, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Alexander Ilyich Mayorov "Oasis of Nostalgia". The exposition will include about forty works from three painting cycles that have been created by the author over the past five years. Some of them will be presented to the audience for the first time.

In modern Russian painting, the work of Alexander Mayorov occupies a special place. The artist is worried about eternal and global issues - the meaning of life, creation, beauty, transformation of the world by means of love. Recently created cycles of paintings - "Oasis of Nostalgia", "Venice Walk" and "Solitaire on the Eve of the Seventeenth" - testify to the bright individuality of the artist’s creative manner and his loyalty to art as an effective means of spiritual evolution.

The artist’s worldview is extremely modern: he knows how to find an everlasting meaning in acutely topical collisions of today, embedding this or that event in the context of the history of the spiritual development of Man and society. The world in Mayorov’s works breaks up into fragments, from which he chooses what he needs, discarding the rest. The artist is just as free in his attitude to space: geographic frameworks are alien to him, creativity is woven into a single modern cultural context, one of the important features of which is the blurring of boundaries between styles, genres, and types of creativity.

Realizing the dramatic nature of his time, not harboring illusions of imminent happiness for everyone, Alexander Mayorov is far from the idea of embodying gloomy forebodings, despair, and a sense of hopelessness in his paintings. The guidelines on which he relies in life and work are based on eternal values, loyalty to beauty and honor.

The path to art for Alexander Mayorov was not easy: he decided to become an artist soon after graduating from the Tula Polytechnic Institute. At first, the master was engaged in design, then turned to the art of cinema, acting as a production designer for the film "Angel Day" (Lenfilm, 1988). At the same time, Mayorov chose painting as the main type of creativity, the secrets of which he mastered both independently and in master classes at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. V.I.Surikov. Among his landmarks in world art, A. Mayorov points to the creative legacy of Sandro Botticelli, Jan Vermeer and Diego Velazquez, Konstantin Somov and Marc Chagall, as well as Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Delvaux and Antonio Gaudi.

Today Alexander Mayorov is an author recognized by the art community and loved by the audience. In recent years, he has held over 30 solo exhibitions in Russia and abroad. He was awarded the Gold Medal, medals "Worthy" and "Shuvalov" of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Gold Medal of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia. In 2001, A. Mayorov was awarded the degree of Doctor of Art according to UNESCO, and since 2002 - professor at the Tula State Pedagogical University named after V.I. L. N. Tolstoy. The artist’s works are presented in the collections of museums in Russia, Spain and Bulgaria; in galleries, corporate and private collections in Russia, USA, Canada, Israel, South Africa, a number of European countries.

In one of the essays to the paintings on display at the exhibition, Alexander Mayorov writes: “And all this is with you: the magic of postcards in noble albums with half-fluttered gold patterns, the scent of old books and some special glow of soft pastel colors of porcelain in grandmother’s house. An old but solid house on an old Tula street next to the cathedral and the cemetery where marble angels live. Childhood, and soon the silence, interrupted by the rare strikes of the cathedral bells, will explode with the drums of Ringo Star, and a yellow submarine will pick you up and carry you away. And now you are already a soldier of this army - the club of lonely hearts of Sergeant Pepper. Your uniform is frayed jeans, long hair, and platform shoes, and you know that strawberry fields are forever like Paul, John, George and Ringo.And then a “handsome and courageous” soldier - Bulat Okudzhava’s soldier - will stand guard next to Sergeant Pepper. And they guard you, grandmother’s house, the locomotive on which you were lucky enough to ride, your dreams, where Spring and the maidens from postcards from the old album carry a gramophone of flowers, where beautiful faces are in yellowed photographs, where there is a silk bird embroidered by your mother… True - how cool that you have all this, that there is such an Oasis. "