Located 130 miles northeast of Moscow, Vladimir is an old Russian industrial city boasting a population of nearly a half-million people and a longtime reputation in the arts world as a center for the creation and restoration of traditional religious icons.
Since 1986, it also has been the sister city of the Bloomington-Normal area, and in recent years it has produced a rich variety of contemporary art, according to freelance curator Debra Risberg. She organized a traveling show of new Russian paintings and photographs on display through Feb. 10 in College of DuPage’s Gahlberg Gallery in Glen Ellyn.
“There are artists everywhere in Vladimir,” said Risberg, a Normal resident who visited the Russian city in 1996 and 1998 to select artists for “The Sound of the Sun,” originally mounted at Illinois State University in Normal. “It’s a very creative city, and I was especially interested in younger artists working outside what has become the mainstream of Russian art.
“It sounds kind of cliched, but I think that the artists in the show all express the evolution of the human spirit, the evolutionary energy of humanity.”
Barbara Wiesen, the gallery’s director and curator, said the value of the exhibition lies partly in its expression of contemporary Russian culture, which has drawn increasingly from Western and modern art influences.
“Americans often are sort of ignorant about the art that comes out of different countries and cultures, which is one reason we try to bring international art to the Gahlberg Gallery,” Wiesen said. “It’s especially interesting to look at these works, knowing that they are coming from Russia.”
“The Sound of the Sun” features a total of 23 works by photographer Sergei Skaratov and painters Olga Gollman, Leonid Kozinstev, Yuri Lebedenko and Yuri Negodaev. All live or work in Vladimir and range in age from the mid-20s to around 50.
Some are teachers; Skaratov works as a commercial photographer. None makes a living solely from his or her art. Though many artists everywhere complain about the difficulties of making a living from their work, Russian outsider artists have it especially tough, according to Risberg.
“In Russia, the artists who teach at universities and are part of the mainstream system do all right–not that they live high on the hog by American standards,” Risberg said. “I met one college art teacher in Vladimir, for example, who was living with his family in a dormitory.
“But for artists who work outside of the mainstream, who don’t do the traditional peasant paintings, it is much harder,” she added. “They have the urge to create these pieces. But because of the Russian economy, who is going to have the money to buy their work or show it?”
Wiesen noted that at least one of the figural paintings, Gollman’s “In Your Absence,” could be interpreted as reflecting Russia’s culture of struggle. The picture depicts stylized figures seated in chairs, with a light wash of paint covering their bodies where clothing typically would be.
“The wash of paint could be read in several different ways in terms of carrying a certain image of social class,” Wiesen said. “It is as if they have clothes on, and yet they don’t. I think because Russia is a poor, struggling society, they want to show themselves as glamorous, at least in the artists’ imagination. The wash also could be seen as dealing with issues of transparency; there is an ephemeral quality to the painting, a sense of change.”
According to Risberg, although the Vladimir artists represented in the show are working in a politically charged climate, the exhibition is not overtly political.
“There is a political play to some of Sergei’s work,” Risberg noted, referring in particular to Skaratov’s black-and-white photograph of two small children nestled in the arms of a large statue of Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavovich, who founded the city in 990 A.D. “But the works are not trying to convince us of anything. They are more about the individual human experience within the context of a political society.”
