Alexei Kiryanov's haunting "First Snow"
The more than 400 works of art at the Central Exhibition Hall (Manezh) are sure to offer something to delight and disgust almost anyone who attends.
This month, St Petersburg artists are presenting their work of 1995 to the public.
The exhibition opens with an ambiguous heavy rough construction without any intelligible name -- a sort of three-decked boat on baby buggy wheels.
To its right stands an impressive sculpture of some small conceited energetic warrior covered with metal rivets, who is frozen in a "Surge". To where? It looks like it may be his Last Surge to the South...
Near the straightforward fighter, two wooden creatures stuck together and toasting with wineglasses look extremely romantic. Two complicated white plaster statues further down the exhibition deserve detailed observation and deep analyses. Start with the woman with the dog head...
The center of the ground floor was given to the "exhibition in the exhibition." Several dozen paintings belonging to Osip Sidlin, his school, and students of his students are on display. Sidlin, who died in 1972, was educated in St Petersburg's Arts Academy and launched his own school in the 1930s, in the years when the only allowed art style in Russia was social realism.
"We had to hide our real paintings then," said Yuri Nashivochnikov, one of Sidlin's students.
Nashivochnikov is the current senior member at Sidlin's school. He said he considers his mentor to be the Einstein of painting.
"The divine side of the creative activity of Sidlin's school is not so easy to explain," said Nashivochnikov.
The school uses warm earth tones -- different tints of brown, green, ochre -- no white colors and not even white canvas to paint on.
The Sidlin school does not provide plaques for their works, saying it is not necessary for them.
After Sidlin's suicide in 1972, most of his paintings were burned according to his will. Only seven works of the artist remained on Earth, rescued by the students.
Two of Sidlin's works are kept in the Russian Museum and are included in the exhibition.
Even now the school does not have any workshop and paintings are filling a communal flat on Vasilyevsky Island.
Some pieces of art displayed in the Manezh are a bit of a surprise -- Apostle Peter in the image of a hairy ape; the Biblical character Judith made out of pieces of artificial leather; strange Sursiki -- two semi-silhouettes with two semi-heads, semi-lines of eyes and two sets of hair...
And at the very end of the exhibition a strange beast stands. Reminiscent of a huge crocodile, the thing made of packing cartons may well be a joke by exhibition organizers, made of the paintings' wrappings which they forgot to remove.
Many pictures are very St Petersburg, like Dmitry Gretsky's "In the Rain": a large crowd in the Canal Griboyedova entrance to the Nevsky Prospect Metro station -- a dark room, a dark and high ceiling, like a temple. The dark, sad, wet crowd waits for the rain to stop...but it does not stop, and the despair of the crowd is enormous, as well as the exaggerated size of the space.
There is everything in the Manezh these days except for only one thing -- there is no cheerful enthusiasm on the red-cheeked faces of happy builders of communism with spades, hammers and sickles.