THEMES AND VARIATIONS: JUBILEE EXHIBITION OF PAINTING AND GRAPHICS BY THE PEOPLE’S ARTIST OF RUSSIA BORIS MESSERER AT THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS

Dates: March 22 – April 09, 2023

Venue: Exhibition Halls of the Russian Academy of Arts (21 Prechistenka street, Moscow)

 

The Russian Academy of Arts presents the Jubilee exhibition of the eminent master of fine arts, the Patriarch of Russian scenography, People’s Artist of Russia, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, holder of many titles and awards Boris A. Messerer. The major retrospective entitled “Themes and Variations” features almost 100 paintings and graphic works by the Master including portraits, landscape sand still lives never shown to the public before.

 

In each of his solo exhibitions Boris Messerer appears in various guises. Today, we have an opportunity to see the pictorial world of the artist who dedicated many decades of his creative career to the theater, in particular, to sеt design. The author’s selection of works for his jubilee exhibition proves the complexity of interaction between various types and genres of fine arts. Messerer’s paintings originated from his devotion to space and polyphony of the scene have been created in the artist’s studio and their dimensions require specific principles of exhibiting. His works of big format designed for the scene in ordinary exhibition halls demonstrate their powerful energy while tending to shift the accents.  

 

Boris Messerer has worked for the musical theater and first of all for the Bolshoi Theater for a long time. The natural immersion of the artist into the world of figurative sound, his understanding of the composer’s idea and talent to listen to the conductor - all these necessary features of a true theater professional have been developed throughout his creative life and reflected in the pictorial structure of his easel works influenced by theatrical impressions.

 

The artist is known for his compound still lives. His famous gramophones have become heroes of many of his works. Equally impressive are his interiors with chairs and armchairs of curved shapes. Among the artist’s favorite objects are elongated clear glass bottles through which can be seen fragments of the background, as well as unusual metal things combined with paper, fabrics and other textures. This unity of opposites also reminds of the theatrical nature of his thinking. The exhibition of painting by Boris Messerer gives a good opportunity to trace his career as an artist. On display are his early pictures of the 1960s known as     still lives with jugs, in the 1970s he began his ballet series and still lives with gramophones, in 2015-2018 there appeared still lives with balusters and numerous non-objective compositions, sketches and watercolors.

Theater, painting, easel and book graphics, 3D – sculpture and installations represent a wide range of the artist’s interests throughout his life. In the early years of his creative career he often turned to book illustrations, which are represented in the jubilee exhibition too. The scale of what has been done by the Master causes our genuine admiration for the boundless energy and incredible talent of the Master.   


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