"Captured by beauty..." Nikolai Gurin

The exhibition space presents the works of the Tarusa artist, member of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation Nikolai Georgievich Gurin. N. Gurin himself proudly calls himself a Tarusian master, emphasizing not so much his belonging to a certain territory, but, above all, his great, deep love for this place and everything that surrounds it - the picturesque banks of the river. Oka, small provincial streets, armfuls of garden flowers, birds singing outside the workshop windows…

Nikolai Gurin writes only what he knows and understands well. The main element of his work is, of course, the Russian landscape. This is a permanent, annual, if not daily cycle of themes and motifs, material for quick sketches from nature and thoughtful long-term compositions, where the landscape can be safely correlated with the thematic picture.

Love for Tarusa and Oka nature is the driving force behind N. Gurin’s creativity. Most of the works created by the artist are landscapes painted in the city itself and its environs - urban and rural.

The painter is also characterized by the third type - landscapes of "earth and sky" - they seem especially spacious and open to the eye, they are dominated by the air and light environment in its purest form. In the large planes of heaven and earth, in the so-called "emptiness", N. Gurin contains many precious qualities of real painting. The colors shimmer, shimmer slightly, breathe… As the great Russian artist Vasily Surikov said, “Color is equal to love.” "Emptiness" has become a precious layer of paint, that is, what is real painting, and not an imitation of nature.

In his still lifes, a genre the artist has increasingly turned to in recent years, Nikolai Gurin continues the traditions of the Russian realistic school that emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and developed in the Soviet years by various domestic masters. Most of the master’s still lifes are flower compositions that come to his canvases from landscape space. The artist sometimes returns them back to the landscape and writes in an environment of air saturated with glare of sunlight and various color reflections. As a result, we see a kind of landscape still lifes or still life landscapes, inextricably linked with each other. There are still lifes painted in a free impressionistic manner, there are significantly different from them - carefully written and in many respects "ceremonial" staged still lifes, where bouquets stand in vases.

Nikolai Gurin is a most interesting Russian artist, possessing not only a recognizable creative style, but also a powerful energy, an artistic impulse that pervades all his works.

It surprisingly harmoniously combines deep and thoughtful work on nature, composition, color and virtuoso lightness of the brush, evoking a whole whirlwind of emotions in the viewer and forcing him to stand at his works for a long time, internally empathizing with what he saw.