Show of Illustrations by the Honored Artist of Russia Yury Lyukshin to Elias Lonnrot’s Book “Kalevala”
The exhibition is a result of the long term work of this classic of St. Petersburg graphic school on topics of the Finnish and Karelian epic. The exposition includes over 50 works created by Yury Lyukshin specially for the latest edition of “Kalevala” (published by Vita Nova. St. Petersburg, 2010) together with over 20 works produced within several decades of his work at the epic images.
Yury Lyukshin was born in Leningrad in 1949. In 1971 he graduated from V. Serov art college. Lyukshin has participated in over 300 exhibitions in Russia and other countries, sixty of which were his solo shows. The artist has been honored with many professional awards.
Yury Lukshin started his graphic work on “Kalevala” in the year, when the world marked the 150th anniversary of its first publication. Right from the start, his illustrations to the book and easel works from this cycle were highly appreciated by art critics and connoisseurs of graphic art. It became obvious that there appeared a new, audacious interpreter of not only the elements of the plot, but also the philosophical strata contained in 50 runes of this epic poem.
The artist has considered the text not as a collection of myths, but as a natural philosophy poem. Yury Lyukshin’s illustrations paradoxically unite scientific arguments of Professor Elias Lonnrot and the wisdom of the Finnish and Karelian folklore. As Lyukshin has put it, “Kalevala” is a path for learning the ancestors’ voices, a song, an invocation, a prayer to the World Spirit of the Mankind”.
The artist’s works are in collections of the State Hermitage and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Ludwig Museum (Cologne) and other prestigious collections.
print version