Yuri Zlotnikov. "PAINTING - ANALYSIS OF HUMAN PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY AND DISPLAY OF ITS HUMAN SPACE"

In the halls of the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery at the address: st. Prechistenka 19, an exhibition of works by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts Yuri Zlotnikov "Painting - an analysis of the psychophysiology of man and the display of his being space" opens.

The retrospective exhibition includes over 150 paintings and graphic works created in the 1950s - 2015.

Yuri Zlotnikov is one of the brightest and most significant artists of Russian abstract art. He was born in 1930 in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Art School, worked as a trainee-decorator at the Bolshoi Theater, was engaged in exhibition design at VDNH, and worked with publishers as a book illustrator. And all this time he was looking for his own path in art, his own system of visual means. In the mid-1950s, Zlotnikov created a series of abstract graphic sheets “Signal System”. Together with psychologists, he conducted experiments, trying to understand how the human brain perceives the signals sent by the pictures. “For me, art is first and foremost research,” says the artist.

In the early 1960s, Zlotnikov again turned to reality, went on creative business trips. The mastery of composition, the natural sense of color is distinguished by his picturesque portraits and figurative series: "Showcase", "City", "Balakovo". Already in these works, his understanding of the picture as a conditional construction is manifested. And then he writes multi-figure compositions, seen from above and as if in the distance, this vision allowed him to transmit a large scale even in small-sized paintings. Since the end of the 1940s, he devoted many works to the theme of Moscow.

In the 1970s, Zlotnikov worked on the Koktebel series, in which he returned to abstract painting, but in a different style than in the famous Signal System. Near the lyrical southern landscapes, works appear where space plays a major role, and a top view turns human figures and objects into color spots, lines, commas on the surface of the sheet, dissolving them in the natural environment.

In the 1970s and 2000s, with each new series, the artist designates a certain stage of creativity, often not associated with the previous one. Metaphorical, allegorical is the "Bible cycle." Here there are quite recognizable heroes (“Sacrifice”, “The Birth of Joseph”), and a pure abstraction of color spots and geometric shapes - all the works are united by a tense imagery, a tragic sense of sacred history.

The constant spirit of the experiment makes the artist look for new ways. In the film “Antithesis to the Black Square” by Malevich ”(1988), Zlotnikov conveys the infinity of color sensations of the surrounding world with his catchy, energetic strokes.

In the 1990s-2000s, he continued his plastic experiments, working on the series: “Spatial Structures”, “Jerusalem”, “Spatial Combinatorics”, “Polyphony” and others, constantly surprising with unexpected creative discoveries.

Doctor of Art History A. Rappaport writes: “Zlotnikov is unique in that he never imitated anyone, set his own laws and patterns and did not change the principles of abstract art, which were later subjected to decisive revision by conceptualists. His opposition to conceptualism is evidence of uncompromisingness. Zlotnikov’s kin with conceptual art is a respect for science and philosophy. From all directions of the vanguard, Zlotnikov chooses non-objectivity, abstraction. ”

The works of Yu. Zlotnikov are in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. A. Pushkin, State Literary Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, in many Russian and foreign museums and private collections.