Igor Dryomin:
Leo Tabenkin, "Time to Talk"

The exhibition of Leo Tabenkin “Time to Talk” will be held in the ARTSTORY gallery from November 26, 2015. January 24, 2016 The project includes rare works by the masters of the 1980-1990s, many of which are exhibited for the first time. Huge (up to 3 meters!) Canvases once traveled to foreign exhibitions, then lay curled up in a tube in a warehouse in Germany, and only recently returned to the artist’s workshop. This “return” contains many meanings. Leo Tabenkin is one of the leading artists of Russian figurative painting of that generation, which is commonly called “eighties” in Russian art history. The exhibition directly addresses the turning point of the end of the “era of the Soviet Union”, the origins of the master’s work. By the turn of the 80s-90s - to that “perestroika” time, when it seemed to everyone that it was finally time to SPEAK. The artist thus formulates one of the main postulates of his work: “The main idea, as opposed to official Soviet ideology, historiography, all that we have been fed for 70 years, is to return to religious subjects, mythology, to the sources that mankind has been living for centuries”.

In his canvases there is everything - sadness and joy, passion and lyrics, irony and pain, the mythology of life and the beginning of life in myth. Unnamed heroes of Tabenkin are minimally individualized and at the same time frighteningly alive. The creator of the unique plastic language of easel paintings and sculptures, the artist found his plastic formula expressing the concepts of “woman”, “man”, “bird”, “fish”.

The origins of Tabenkin’s worldview should be sought in the so-called "carnival" culture, perceived through the prism of the works of old masters. The artist’s plots are always theatrical; he always consciously emphasizes that real art is rooted in the mystery of antiquity with its secret, sacred content, and invites the viewer to decipher some universal traditions from the depths of centuries that acquire special convincingness, being created in our era and thereby actualized for contemporaries.

“In the visual arts, we are witnessing a real miracle, a miracle of transforming material - paint, stone, etc. into another, spiritual substance… Metamorphosis, transformation - is an integral feature, a definition inherent in any artistic manifestation,” the master says.

Lev Ilyich Tabenkin was born in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (1975). Since 1978, a member of the Union of Artists. Back in the 80s, critics confidently ranked Lev Ilyich among plastic painters, that is, those for whom the expressiveness of the image is achieved by the expressiveness of color construction. His creative method is based on a rare genre picture for contemporary artists.

Tabenkin was a participant in the historic Sotheby’s Auction in Moscow (1988). Lev Tabenkin’s works are in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, many Russian art museums (in Ivanovo, Kursk, Kemerovo, Orel, etc.), the ARTSTORY gallery, and foreign museum and private collections in Germany and France - the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), Galerie Nannen (Emden), Ludwigsburg Museum (Ludwigsburg), etc.