Exhibition of works by Galina Vanshenkina "Imprint of a Personality"

The Russian Academy of Arts and the GrosArt gallery present an exhibition of works by the Moscow graphic artist Galina Vanshenkina. The exposition consisted of works of different years, characterizing the features of her author’s style, developing in line with artistic and plastic searches of the XX century and one of the facets of modern graphic art.

Galina Konstantinovna Vanshenkina was born in 1950 in the family of Russian poets Konstantin Vanshenkin and Inna Goff. In 1973 she graduated from the art department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. He is engaged in printing and easel graphics, designs books, works in the rare etching technique of pure aquatint. She is a member of the Association of Graphic Arts, Moscow Association "Print". The master’s works are presented in the collections of the State Russian Museum, Pushkin Museum im. A. Pushkin, private collections in the USA, Italy, Israel, France.

The formation of the artist’s creative personality begins with the path to his profession, which in each case is both unique and natural. Galina Vanshenkina, who loved to draw from childhood, at the age of twelve made a firm decision to become an artist and after graduating from school she entered the Polygraphic Institute (formerly VKHUTEMAS), which was always famous for its freedom-loving traditions and outstanding teachers in the person of, first of all, Vladimir Favorsky, Peter Miturich, and later his student Pavel Zakharov, Andrey Goncharov and others. According to Vanshenkina’s recollections, the institute "taught not only to draw, but also to think." Within the walls of this educational institution, the practice was to do without academic studies and plaster casts, to use only a living model. So the inner freedom of the student organically coincided with the spirit of the institute.

At the heart of the author’s method of any artist, one should most often look for a source of inspiration characteristic of him, which can be hidden in the physical or metaphysical, supra-real, in directly sensory or speculative experience. Galina Vanshenkina does not invent plots and motives for her graphic series, she rather gives herself up to the spontaneous emergence of plastic images, believing that "the artist thinks not only with his head." She experienced a special insight and super inspiration when a new technique came to her.

Back in 1976, as part of a group of young artists Vanshenkina first appeared in the etching workshops of the Chelyuskinskaya Art House and there she discovered aquatint as one of the most expressive etching techniques, with its decorative properties, tonal variety, texture, enriched with white grains of fused rosin… The artist demonstrates the rich imaginative and technical capabilities of aquatint, for example, in her early series "Foreshortenings" (1987), whose characters, who are attentive visitors to art museums, are subject to light plastic grotesque and are distinguished by refined transmission of gestures and poses.

In 1990, Galina Vanshenkina managed to significantly modernize her favorite technique. According to the artist’s recollections, at some point it dawned on her “that you can use the thread as another tool for drawing on the plate - you get a thin line, unattainable in etching in any other way”. This is how the "Bible Cycle" was born. Later, she came up with many other things, which enhances the expressiveness of the sheet, making the print unique, but it was with the thread that draws a white line of various outlines that a special interaction developed that turned it into a real one.

The formal language of her easel graphic works, distinguished by a vivid individuality and lack of borrowings, finds, however, analogies with some phenomena of art of the twentieth century, one way or another associated with plastic minimalism. For example, the geometrized ribbon-like forms in the sheets from the 1999 series "Screens" evoke in memory individual samples of Frank Stella’s post-painterly abstraction. And the monumental figures in the series "On the Shore" (2005) and "In the Water" (2010–2011) echo the visual forms of representatives of the art of organic abstraction in the person of, say, the Japanese designer Isamu Noguchi or the British sculptor Henry Moore. In addition, some of the formal techniques of the Moscow artist used in the series of works "Childhood" (1998-1999), "Table of noses according to Durer" (2004),"From the life of a doll" (2004-2005) and others lightly point to the symbolic-litrist and tabular-automatic visual "registers" of domestic masters of the conceptual circle, such as Valery Gerlovin, Igor Makarevich or Viktor Pivovarov.

However, a purely abstract artistic concept as such does not interest Vanshenkin at all; on the contrary, she is occupied with an intriguing plastic game, as if played out from notes, rich in silhouette nuances and rhythmic paradoxes. Undoubtedly, the heightened sense of rhythm and expressive formal generalization, but while maintaining the attachment to reality, also makes the compositions from the series "Conveyor" (2004) and "Peasants" (2009) in common with the impeccably found graphic motifs of fences and children’s figures of one of the indisputable gurus of Russian graphics, the first half of the twentieth century Peter Miturich.

Confidently moving towards strengthening the abstraction of pictorial forms, as evidenced by works from the series of recent years "Gynecology" or "Madonna in a Landscape" (2017) and especially "Path" in 2018, Vanshenkina still does not break completely with the figurative motivation of the artistic image… Hence, we can conclude that such a consistent synthesis of these two opposite principles is the main peculiar feature of her stylistics.

Galina Vanshenkina’s art is remarkable for many professional qualities. Firstly, despite the technological busyness, it does not smell like a lamp, as the ancient Romans would say. Secondly, it maintains a delicate synthesizing balance between idea and feeling, geometry and organics, abstraction and figurative, unconditional, albeit discreet innovation and, along with it, careful attention to tradition, organically mixed on the easy combination of the principles of "plastics" and "Metaphorists", clairvoyantly designated by art critic G. Elshevskaya in the domestic graphics of the last decades of the XX century. Finally, it is distinguished by the enviable "precision" that Favorsky especially singled out in "high works of art" along with originality, musicality and rhythm.

Etching itself is difficult, and Vanshenkina still complicates her task in every possible way. As a true artist, she is rarely completely satisfied with the result. She is interested in the process of creating works, a full-fledged "imprint of personality" in art. She loves experiment, and for many years that young creative passion, which can lead to new discoveries and discoveries, has been preserved in her.

The material was prepared on the basis of an article by the curator of the project, art critic Elena Gribonosova-Grebneva