Objects of Love: Paintings by Elena Mukhina on Display in Tsereteli Art Gallery
On October 7, 2008 the Russian Academy of Arts and the Yaroslavl Regional Brunch of the Russian Artists’ Union present a display of paintings by Elena Mukhina entitled Objects of Love.
Elena Mukhina was born in Yaroslavl in the family of painter Fiedor Novotelny. She received her artistic education at the Yaroslavl Art College where she studied under Valentin Leontiev, Yulia Druzhinina and other pupils of the renowned artist Alexander Osmerkin. Since 1975 Elena Mukhina has been a frequent exhibitor in home and international exhibitions, has gone in for etching, lithography, worked in the pastel technique. Since 1985 she has been a member of the Russian Artists’ Union. From 2000 to 2003 Mukhina was in the board of directors of the Yaroslavl Regional Brunch of the Russian Artists’ Union. Her work has been appreciated by a medal of the Russian Academy of Arts.
The formation and development of the “nude” genre in Russian painting is mostly connected with the names of such celebrated Russian artists as Alexei Venetsianov, Boris Kustodiev, Zinaida Serebryakova and later Alexander Deineka, Arkady Plastov, Igor Obrosov and others. Each of them implemented the idea of pure and lofty female beauty in his or her own distinguished manner.
Elena Mukhina started painting her nudes in the post restructuring period, when this genre gave rise to creation of artworks far from thoughts of the modern ideal of feminine beauty especially in its national Russian version. The artist’s paintings prove her intent to revive the full authority and value of the genre personifying an innermost and at the same time everyday world of a woman today. They are akin to monumental panels remarkable by the greatness of existence of the fair sex, its sound eroticism and lavish sensuality. Following the traditions of the Russian primitivistic style, she often inserts worded explanations into her paintings. Works by Muchina are noted for their bright poetics, vigorous pictorial language and liberty of creative searches. They are in private collections in Russia, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, the United States, as well as in art museums in Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, Norilsk, Moscow (Moscow Museum of Modern Art).
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