"Missing letter." Exhibition of works by Ksenia Nechitailo

May 21, 2019 in the halls of the Russian Academy of Arts opens a personal exhibition of the corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts Ksenia Nechitailo (1942-2019).

The exposition covers more than forty years of the artist’s complex creative biography, from the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s until today, and includes about sixty paintings and twenty sheets of easel graphics from private collections and the author’s family collection. Many of the works on display have been created in the last decade. However, the exhibition does not generalize the art of Ksenia Nechitailo. The fact is that a retrospective exhibition of the artist has already taken place at the Russian Academy of Arts. Then, in 2013, the project "At the turn of the century" really offered a thematic and formal-stylistic interpretation and showed the development of genres that interested Ksenia Nechitailo. Portrait, still life, landscape and thematic composition in the artist’s paintings act on aesthetic rapprochement, forming a single environment of the world under study. Getting into the autonomous visual field of the canvas plane, genre features lose their historical significance. The reality registered by the picturesque genre is being replaced by the empirical experience lived here and now, which remains, nevertheless, an instrument for expressing social life. Ksenia Nechitailo’s works reveal those qualitative changes that are wholly relevant to the present, that is, reflect social experience in the processes characteristic of it for duration, moreover, for an individual generation. This creative method, which we called in the wake of the theoretician and cultural historian Raymond Williams, “the structure of feeling” is dedicated to the exhibition “Missing Certificate”. In addition, the exhibition makes an attempt to rethink some of the artistic attitudes of the generation of the “seventies”, who managed to become a stereotypical cliché of late Soviet art criticism.

Ksenia Vasilievna Nechitailo was born in Moscow in 1942 in the family of the People’s Artist of the RSFSR, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts V.K. Unreadable. In 1967 she graduated from the Moscow State Academic Art Institute. V.I. Surikova, where she studied with famous artists and teachers - A.M. Gritsaya and D.D. Zhilinsky - along with such bright and talented artists as T. Nazarenko, N. Nesterova, I. Starzhenetskaya. Since 1969 - a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, an active participant in Russian and international exhibitions and symposia. The works of K. Nechitailo are stored in the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, art galleries and museums in Vologda, Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk, Orenburg, Perm and other cities of Russia, in a number of museums and private collections in Germany, Holland, USA, France.

Ksenia Nechitailo belongs to a bright galaxy of artists who entered the domestic art in the late 1960s, declaring herself to appeal to the artistic traditions of the early twentieth century, as well as to folk art.

K.V. Nechitailo brought to art its own special, sharpened personal position, sincere, lyrical and solemn notes.

In her every composition, portrait and even landscape, the natural moments of being acquire a symbolic sound. Her grotesque images are imbued with the author’s experience. The author avoids the image of template beauty: the portraits of her heroes are deliberately deformed, sometimes ironic and even parody.

K. Nechitailo’s painting is marked by autobiographicality, pathos of frank and, as a rule, bitter introspection. Nechitailo did not seek to embellish her characters - more often than not, the heroes of her works, captured in the thick of everyday life, are marked with a hard stamp of realism. The artist continues this line in our days, contrasting the beauty of the world with the elements of evil, which is angrily exposed with grotesque elements in her sometimes metaphorical canvases. Owing to the bitter insight inherent in K. Nechitailo’s worldview, she was one of the first among her contemporaries, almost prophetically, posed the paradoxical problem not only of Russian history itself, but also of today’s attitude to it. A sense of anxiety, tension, the dysfunction of life, an acute reaction to painful changes in society - these are the features of the warning art of Nechitailo.

However, simultaneously with the drama of the paintings revealing the contradictory nature of being, it is adjacent to the expression of a whole and joyful worldview in a number of works devoted to the author’s family and relatives. Among the most important for the artist is the theme of motherhood and childhood; models are often her daughters and friends, whose portraits are also included in the exhibition. Nechitailo shows a specific autobiographical situation: high, just like in reality, is always adjacent to Nechitailo with the simple realities of life.

The art of painting by K. Nechitailo, which has undergone a serious evolution, is characterized by a game with spatial effects, a daring combination of genres, associativity, a combination of lyrical-confessional intonation, which comes from the tradition of Russian portrait, with an expressive manner, irony and grotesque.