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Showing posts with label moscow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moscow. Show all posts

Sunday, 23 January 2022

Artlyst - Marvellous Icons

My latest article for Artlyst is a diary piece which begins with Irina Bradley's 'Metamorphosis' exhibition at the London Jesuit Centre and takes in secular icons, author's icons, After Icon, and celebrities as icons:

'Last year saw a First Biennale of Christ-centred Art held in Moscow with the blessing of His Eminence Hilarion, Metropolitan of Volokolamsk. The Biennale exhibited 150 works by 67 artists that created a dialogue between works of church art and contemporary artworks from a wide range of artists. One strand of the Biennale focused on ‘author’s icons,’ a term first proposed by the Russian art critic Irina Yazykova in 2015. Viktor Barashkov has explained that this term ‘points to the difference between the rendition of an icon by one master and another, which means that the icon can be made in a personal manner, a unique artistic style and can be based on the author’s own interpretation of the image.’

Among those exhibiting was Alexandr Tsypkov, who has recently been interviewed by Christian Century. Tsypkov is part of a group of artists called After Icon who, as Jason Byassee writes, beautify ‘abandoned buildings in Russia with ancient Christian images.’ The innovation of Tsypkov’s work, and that of his fellow artists in the After Icon project, is to create icons in ‘”secular” spaces—on rubble, trees, street corners, and the like, alongside fellow graffiti artists.’’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:56 0 comments
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Wednesday, 18 November 2015

London stands in solidarity with Paris

The Bishop of London had an article in yesterday's Evening Standard in response to the attacks in Paris. In the piece he reflected on his recent visit to Moscow where he gave a speech at a bi-lateral symposium with the Russian Orthodox Church and also met with Russia’s Islamic leader, the Supreme Mufti.

Bishop Richard’s article is also published in full on the diocesan website: London stands in solidarity with Paris.

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Francis Poulenc - O Magnum Mysterium.
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Friday, 15 February 2013

Subsumed into the strata of time
















I've enjoyed visits to the Saatchi Gallery ('Breaking the ice: Moscow Art 1960-80s' and 'Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union: New art from Russia') and Tate Modern ('A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance'). The highlights for me were the work of Jānis Avotiņš and Dmitry Plavinski:

With their ghostly, alienated faces and figures reminiscent of Soviet-era photography, Jānis Avotiņš thinly painted canvases draw us into a fragile, elliptic world haunted by collective memory. Often using a minimalistic, monochromatic aesthetic reminiscent of fellow Latvian artist Vija Celmins, Avotiņš’ virtuosic imprimatura washes and technique blur and erase the specificity of his subjects, imbuing his images with an air of mystery, rather than nostalgia.

Dmitry Plavinski describes the artistic movement he developed as ‘structural symbolism’ where an integral view of the world disintegrates into a sequence of symbolic forms, subsumed into the strata of time – the past, present and future. In 1964 he produced a graphical book of grasses painted from life after which he finally moved across to figural painting, as well as texture painting, and his works increasingly included religious motifs. In the middle of the 1960’s the artist created large canvases entitled ‘Gospel of John’, ‘Novgorod Wall’ and ‘The Ancient Book’ which used plastic and ligatures of scripts from ancient Slavic texts. Plavinsky said, 'Creation by human thought and hand is sooner or later absorbed by the eternal poetry of nature ... For me, it is not the birth of a civilisation which is of greatest interest but its death and the moment its successor is born …’

I was also fortunate to visit St John the Evangelist Waterloo in time to hear part of their lunchtime concert by the X Ray Quartet while viewing artworks such as a 'Nativity' and 'Crucifixion' by Hans Feibusch, plus the 'Blue King, Crowned' sculpture. The church clearly contains more contemporary art than it was possible to see while the concert was under way and also houses the Southbank Mosaics Studio and Gallery.

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King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - Bubble.
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