Exhibition of Graphic Works by Vladimir Vetrogonsky and Andrei Vetrogonsky

The display in the Russian Academy of Arts explores drawings, watercolors and engravings by St. Petersburg remarkable graphic artists: People’s Artist of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vetrogonsky (1923-2002) and Andrei Vetrogonsky.  

The Full Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, a master who worked in all the various graphic techniques, Vladimir Vetrogonsky  has survived the horrors of the Siege of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War, was recruited to the army and participated in the liberation of his home city of  Leningrad. In 1946 he entered the Russian Academy of Arts where he studied under A.F. Pakhomov, a brilliant representative of the Leningrad graphic school. The young artist’s main theme was a postwar rebirth of the country. His linocuts and lithographs dedicated to the industrial topic occupy a special place in the artist’s artistic legacy.

In his works, which were created in the 1960s, one can sense the artist’s interest  in the nature and everyday life of his much beloved North West of Russia. Every summer he used to make trips along the Neva river, Ladoga Lake, the Volgo-Balt canals. Many of his works depict sailors of the Volgo-Balt fleet, river transport workers and it is not quite unexpectedly that one of the motor boats bears his name.

Vladimir Vetrogonsky was very prolific in the period of his journeys to France, Italy, Germany, India and China. He did a great deal of watercolors and drawings on architecture, nature and social themes of the countries he had visited.

The artist’s works of the 1980s -1990s convey a subtle sense of color harmony and have a philosophical content.  The most impressive are his landscapes-short stories that are painted with great care and transport the viewer into a special micro-world.
 
He is represented in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum as well as other public museums by his works of various creative periods.

Andrei V. Vetrogonsky, a graduate of I. Repin St. Petersburg State Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, belongs to the generation of graphic artists who started out in the late 1970s. He shows a brilliant mastery of the various graphic techniques and his searches for new graphic devices. Alongside his landscapes of St. Petersburg and northern Russian countryside on display are portraits of his near ones and still lives.






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