"All Colors of Black" by Anna Birshtein Automatic translate

The Russian Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of paintings by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts Anna Maksovna Birshtein “All Colors of Black”. The exposition contains more than 100 works of different years, among which are landscapes, portraits and still lifes, representing a wide range of the author’s creative searches.

For A. M. Birshtein, painting is “an opportunity for a feeling to become a thought, and thoughts – a form.” It is in art that “joyful, incomprehensible and even unpleasant things become conscious” and find expression in artistic images. One of the most important places in the master’s works is occupied by black color, which informs "readiness to fill the void with the color of life", to create your own alternative reality.

Each of the nine halls of the exhibition will present its own "problematic turn" of Anna Birshtein’s art. The exposition will tell about close friends and family ties, about throwing between the past and the future, about relationships and mutual understanding, about the beauty of the so-called "consumption" against which we exist. These blocks form the “text of the exhibition”, shimmering with all the colors of black: from red to purple, from hope to despair, from suffering to inspiration.

Today, Anna Birshtein’s painting has become a classic; not a single museum collection or exhibition of Russian art of the turn of the century is considered complete without her works. Openness to everything beautiful, the ability to assimilate the beauty of nature in herself, allowed her to embody what she experienced on canvas, making the artist’s work deeply personal and humane. The master’s canvases depict beloved people and objects: a daughter, a neighbor in the country, a dog, flowers in the garden, a church on the next street, a house opposite, a bicycle, a book - simple and at the same time the most significant things.

The author’s style is easily recognizable both in figurative works and in abstractions. Over the years, she has consistently developed her own vibrant and expressive pictorial language. According to the leading Russian art critic A.K. Yakimovich: “Anna will not write out a flower or a tree, a friend’s hand or a friend’s hairstyle, captured on a walk or at a festive table. She greedily and swiftly throws energetic strokes, achieving a hit from the first blow… ".

Anna Maksovna Birshtein was born in Moscow in 1947 to the famous artists Max Birshtein and Nina Vatolina. In 1967 she graduated from the Moscow secondary art school, and in 1973 - the faculty of painting of the Moscow State Art Institute. V. I. Surikov, where she studied with Dmitry Zhilinsky and Alexei Gritsay. Since 1976 - a member of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1997 she was a resident at the Cite des Arts (Paris). Personal exhibitions of the author were held in Moscow (1989, 1993, 2003, 2022), Vienna (1996), Krasnodar (2013), Tarussa (2018, 2022), London (2018). The author’s canvases are kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, in the state regional museums of Novosibirsk, Arkhangelsk, Novokuznetsk, Kemerovo and other cities, adorn private and corporate collections in Russia, Europe and USA. The artistic history of the family continues: Anna Birshtein’s daughter, Masha Tsigal, has become a well-known Moscow fashion designer, and for several years a representative of the next generation, grandson Arseniy Tsigal, has been participating in large exhibition programs of contemporary art and design.