Exhibition of works by Ilya Lvovich Tabenkin (1914-1988)

An exhibition of non-conformist artist Ilya Lvovich Tabenkin from the collection of Lyubov Agafonova and private collections opens at the Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts Gallery of Arts Zurab Tsereteli. The exhibition is organized by the Vellum Gallery in collaboration with the Russian Academy of Arts. The exposition presents more than 50 works, among which are both paintings that made the artist famous, abstract still lifes, and graphic works of the 1970-80s.

Ilya Tabenkin was born in 1914 in Mozyr, near Minsk in a family of Belarusian Jews. In 1931, he entered the Moscow Art School of 1905, where M.K.Sokolov was one of the teachers of the future artist. Studying was interrupted in a completely traditional way for that time: in 1934 Ilya Tabenkin was arrested. After his release and during the war, the artist was in Kazakhstan. At the same time, the Moscow Art Institute named after im. Surikov, which allowed Tabenkin to enter him and continue his artistic education. This was also facilitated by the active creative environment that existed here during this difficult time: V. Favorsky, A. Labas, V. Ufimtsev, A. Osmerkin and many other artists.

Ilya Tabenkin began to participate in non-conformist art life in 1968 from the Group of Sixteen exhibition, but, despite its success, he remained special among Moscow artists of the 1960s and 1970s. True interest in the author began to grow in the late 1980s. He was the only artist of his generation to participate in the 1988 Sotheby’s auction in Moscow. In recent years, interest in the work of the author has grown significantly, and his personal exhibitions have been held in many major Russian museums, including the Ryazan Museum of Art and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

Art historians believe that Ilya Tabenkin’s favorite genre is an abstract still life, to which he turned under the influence of the aesthetic ideals of the Italian futurist Giorgio Morandi. In the early 1970s, Tabenkin came up with the idea of creating figures for still lifes. From refractory clay, plaster, papier-mâché, the artist made hundreds of figures of people, animals, various objects and placed them in the space created by him on the table in his workshop. Experts believe that the painstaking construction of the composition and the manufacture of objects was subordinated to the main goal - to convey through a still life their feelings from life, the world. They call the works of Tabenkin metaphysical and philosophical, see in them the development of the Old Testament idea of creating the world.

Feature still lifes I.L. Tabenkina - the impact on the viewer with rhythm, color, scale. Large and small forms, embedded in a shallow space, gain new constructivity, genuine architectonics. Using a wide calm brushstroke, the author convincingly reveals the possibility of a still life as a model of the universe.

According to the memoirs of Ilya Tabenkin, he fully felt that he had taken place as an artist. After the second exhibition of The Group of Sixteen in 1975, he focused entirely on still lifes, creating the unusual “Tabenkin World”, where each work is distinguished by sophistication and beauty.