Uneasy Things: Solo Exhibition of the Honorary Artist of the Russian Academy of Arts Vladimir Molochkov

Dates: 04 April – 23 April, 2017
Venue: The Museum and Exhibition Complex of the Russian Academy of Arts,
            Tsereteli Art Gallery, 19 Prechistenka street, Moscow

The Russian Academy of Arts presents a solo exhibition of the Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts Vladimir Molochkov. According to the traditional terminology he is a still life painter. The artist paints the world of everyday things. He focuses not on things from supermarkets, but on objects that we inherited from the Soviet time. Many of us treat them with nostalgia and love as rarities.

The consumer society has changed everything so quickly and radically, that the Soviet way of life fell into history completely taking with it our joys and experiences of those years. Vladimir Molochkov is very much interested in this lost world. The artist depicts it in detail and with great care filling his canvases with roughly made, crooked, lopsided subjects painted in the familiar dull green, brown or dark-blue colors. The artist usually puts them in the deliberately tight visual space of his pictures. The scale of things is very much enlarged compared with the natural size. The world of objects in his paintings is enclosed by walls and fences of all possible configurations. However, the fences have rotted, the loose boards are not able to block all the holes. But even in these loopholes there is no salvation.

The misanthropic mood of the paintings by Vladimir Molochkov has not influenced his pictorial manner. In the artist’s expressive language one can sense no depressive apathy of a man who lost faith. His painting is active and energetic.  He consistently draws the viewer’s attention to sad generalizations, however, avoids didactic conclusions. In the end, he only paints, that is tells us uneasy things not by words, but the painting itself.





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