An exhibition currently at the Central Hall of the Union of Russian Artists, marks St Petersburg artist Valery Lukka's 50th anniversary. About 200 works offer an impressive painterly range as well as relate to some "heroic" pages of not too distant Soviet history and opposition to the then official art in Leningrad.
Artist Valery Lukka has never been what you would call a dissident.
His biography is rather uneventful and certainly lacks political passion. Even so, during the communist era of the 1970s and 1980s Lukka had to rely on landscapes for official exhibitions while forced to keep his more experimental work hidden away in his studio.
Then the Soviet cultural establishment favoured either ardent communist propaganda or illusion-like pictures with discernable pro-party anecdotal subject matter.
Born in 1945 into a Finnish family, Lukka -- after attending officers' military school and spending some period in the Soviet army -- became a student at the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts.
Graduating in 1977, he then started exhibiting (often as part of a trio with artists Vyacheslav Mikhailov and Felix Volosyenkov) in Leningrad, Moscow and some provincial Russian towns.
But his work developed not within the limits of the Socialist Realism propagated by officialdom; Lukka's inner logic made him embrace abstract art.
Gradually, as the aesthetic censorship became weaker, Lukka came more and more into the open without police harassment. Even now when he tackles a political subject, Lukka bristles with irony. Take, for instance his 1989 "Totalitarian Landscape", an abstract canvas with symbolic wire netting supposedly signifying the claustrophobia of Soviet society.
Then "Landscape with an Iron Curtain" echoes the same theme but by 1989 the real iron curtain had been consigned to the scrap heap of history. Looking at the picture now it seems to come from another age. This is post-perestroika reality in which politics is no longer the main issue of art.
Valery Lukka can be described as a lyrical abstractionist, as opposed to a geometric or hard-edged artist, because he introduces strong sentiment -- satire, anguish and pain.
A Lukka canvas is thick with encrustations of paint, the trademark of style but his subject matter is anything but abstract.
His "Letter from Russia" is a self-penned diary: lines run into one another, words are unintelligible, language looks alien even to a Russian eye.
Lukka deconstructs, dismantles the so-called historical genre in his "Study for a Totalitarian Composition" which is in fact a frivolous replica of a classic Soviet picture featuring Stalin himself as well as a townscape.
St Petersburg's famous baroque palaces and cathedrals appear as a hopeless mess -- their frontons and columns hardly distinguishable at all -- in "Yellow Waters" and "Raining in the City."
Recently Lukka travelled to Europe, realising a long cherished dream. His "Impressions of Italy" draws upon the painter's love for the Old Masters, but this picture also greatly satirises a famous Renaissance fresco by Pisanello where the backside of a horse appears as an unexpected focus of interest; and the artist himself proudly mounts this historical horse.
Contemporary Russian painters who set off in their creative search from abstraction can be characterised as belonging to the "retrospective chaotic trend" -- because the golden days of this artistic movement seem to belong to the 1950s.
It is interesting to note that orthodox American Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock's type didn't have any followers in Russia. For the Russian's passionate mind, its empty decorativeness lacked spiritual fibre.
Furthermore, the proud memory that Russians had helped discover abstraction -- with artists like Kandinsky, Tatlin, Malevich in the early 1900s -- also played a part.
This is why living abstract painters like Lukka, in re-establishing the motto "art for beauty's sake", refer back to Kandinsky's philosophical teachings in "Art of Spiritual Harmony", Malevich's Suprematist theory or Pavel Filonov's "World Flowering", the latter's belief that a painting should grow like a plant, out of the accumulation of minute cells was to influence many subsequent artists.
Lukka invites you to join into his painterly crusade -- art as adventure, art which came in from the cold, after politics.
Valery Lukka "In search of the edge"