"It’s hard to be an angel." Exhibition of works by Sergei Milchenko

The Russian Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of works by Honored Artist of the Russian Federation and Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Sergei Milchenko, timed to coincide with his 60th birthday. The exposition will be made up of sculptural compositions that are amazing in terms of the strength of their emotional impact and the completeness of the plastic solution. In his new works, the sculptor turns to the image of an angel, posing to the viewer the most important questions about the meaning of life in the new historical reality. The master’s works, united under the title "It’s hard to be an angel", contain a modern thought about eternal values, about life and death, about the heavenly world and the fallen world, in the center of which is a person yearning for a lost paradise.

The author belongs to a galaxy of bright and original masters of contemporary Russian art - he successfully works both in easel and monumental sculpture, continuing the tradition of polychromy. From the perspective of his work, there are eternal themes and eternal questions, without comprehending which a person cannot become a whole person. The works of Sergei Grigorievich are real literary canvases: either philosophical treatises, or gospel parables, or ancient myths or folk songs made of stone, wood, glass and metal.

St. John Chrysostom taught: "The whole air is filled with angels." The artist chose only a few from this host. His angels seem to be taken from the security Red Book and are endangered. They do not have a religious beginning, they are not messengers, but strange aliens, lost paradise children, who, however, do not cause tenderness. Despite the fact that each hero in the master’s gallery has his own separate story, all together they make up a single drama in which there is a certain secret, the key to which can only be found by going through all the scenes to the end. The epigraph to the works of Sergei Milchenko could be the words of Fr. Pavel Florensky about the existence of two forms of reality, visible and invisible, the world above and the world below, both created by the Creator: “… these two worlds – the visible world and the invisible world – touch. However, their mutual difference is so great, that the question of the border of their contact cannot but arise. She separates them, but she also unites them. The works of Sergei Milchenko, presented in the new exposition of the Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts, provide a unique opportunity to be on this metaphysical "border of contact".

Sergey Grigoryevich Milchenko was born in 1962 in the Moscow region. He graduated from the Moscow secondary art school, then the Kharkov Institute of Art and Industry. The author works both in easel and monumental sculpture. He made reliefs: "The Capture of Ismail", "The Storming of the Devil’s Bridge" for the monument to Alexander Suvorov in Catherine’s Park in Moscow, the monument to St. Andrew the First-Called in Kharkov, the memorial to the victims of the fascist occupation of Crimea in 1941-1944. in Simferopol, monuments to Alexander Alyabyev and Archpriest Avvakum in Tobolsk and many others. The sculptor performed a number of works for Russian and foreign churches: the composition "The Midnight Savior" for the Ascension Church (Woodchester, Great Britain), a portable cross for the cathedral (Lancaster, Great Britain), a bishop’s crook and a pectoral cross for the cathedral (Lancaster, Great Britain). Whitby, UK), as well as a sculptural Deesis for the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Wolsingham, UK). The master’s works are in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and other Russian museums, as well as in foreign collections in the USA, France, Holland, England.

The material is based on the article "The Dream of Angels" by the poet and literary critic Gennady Krasnikov.

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