VICTOR KALININ

The exhibition of works by the Moscow painter Victor Kalinin embraces the different periods of art of this outstanding master, who is one of the leaders of the so-called "semidesyatniks" generation (innovatory soviet painters. who started to work in the 1970's). The exposition includes more than 100 works from the collection of State Russian museum, private collections and the artist's collection. Together with paintings there are presented the graphic works of last several years, giving the possibility to appraise the actuality of contemporary searches of this master.
Victor Kalinin's works are revealing the deeply private evocative and plastic sight of the world. Already in the early pictures and graphic works, created on the board of the 1960's and the 1970's, revealed itself the aspiration for the search of new unexplored ways in art, characteristic for many of his contemporaries. In the opening of the content of work the great significance has the means of expressiveness - intensive colour contrasts, complex interaction of large plastic masses, stressed picturesque manner. Kalinin is dependent on the artistic re-comprehension of traditions of the Old Russian art and artistic discoveries of the innovatory Russian painting of the boarder of the XIX and the XX century, enabled him to create his deeply individual style.
The leading place in Kalinin's art belongs to the works relevant to the "village series", which he is working on over the last four decades. The philosophically comprehended impressions of childhood, passed in Altay in the patriarchal peasant family, find the expressive embodiment in the paintings, devoted to the image of the father, and also in such a theme ways as the "gates", "bridges" and "wells". The image of the father is associated in artist's mind with the light, filling the dimension of picture and having the powerful plastic energy. The depth and versatility of content in the basis of which is the comprehension of the most significant moral categories of the being, is the main characteristic feature of Kalinin's works, the themes of which are going back to the Christian iconography. The evangelistic themes and characters found the reflection in many-figured compositions, which had become the stages in the painter's art.