MIKHAIL SHVARTSMAN AND HIS DISCIPLES

For the first time in the Russian Museum this exhibition bring together artworks by a prominent master of Soviet unofficial art of the 2nd half of the XX century Mikhail Shvartsman and disciples of his Hieratic School. The exposition will include over 50 painting and graphic works.

Mikhail Shvartsman was the muralist, graphic artist, philosopher, and teacher. His style and plastic language was formed at the end of the 1950s – in the 1960s. He gave the name to his artworks as “hieraturas” and his conception was called as “hieratism”. Shvartsman created this term from the ancient Greek hieros that means “sacred”, “signed”. The artist’s creative oeuvre turns to complex philosophic and religious aspects of reality. On the artist’s mind he created “non-verbal language of the third millennium”. In his non figurative structures with their inner hidden life of forms the artist exposed metamorphosis of life of the Universe. In 1975 Mikhail Shvartsman organized the Hieratic School of painting with a group of disciples, who entered in different years: Valery Bashenin, Dmitry Gorokhov, Dmitry Komissarov, Nikita Medvedev, Gennady Spirin, Vladimir Teplukhin, Mikhail Fyodorov and Anatoly Chashchinsky. This exhibition give viewers an opportunity to immerse into creative world of the School and trace the evolution of ideas of Svartsman’s philosophy in his disciples’ artworks.