Andrei Lanskoy

The Russian Museum presents the one-man show of the artist Andrei Lanskoy. The exposition reflects the main periods and trends in the master's oeuvre. These are: primitivism of the 1920s, geometrical abstraction of the 1940s and the highlight of the artist's creative experiments - 'lyrical abstractionism', which Lanskoy presented to the European culture. No doubt, innovative exhibitions of the early 20^th century impressed a young man as well as a short visit to Kiev, to the studio of Alexandra Exter, and decorations of the famous cabarets by no less famous artist Sergei Sudeikin in Petersburg. Having come to Paris in the early 1920s, Lanskoy visited Sudeikin's art studio. Simultaneously, he was learning the modern trends of the French painting, thus finding himself in the epicenter of the artistic life. He contributed to the Blow exposition of the Russian artists in 1923, exhibited at the Autumn Salon in 1924. Undoubted gift of a caricaturist, special love for colour, motley and movement defined the playing origin of his non-figurative works, their festive and carnival character. A special 'Russian element' distinguished Andrei Lanskoy from other artists of the 'Parisian school' of the 1920s-30s. His primitivist still-lives of that time possess both the full freedom of the drawing and colourist finesse. The next ten years the artist dedicated to the geometric half-figurativeness. In the 1940s Lanskoy is recognized as a serious abstractionist. He is one of the founders of the 'lyrical abstraction', a school that appeared circa 1945, though his canvases and mosaics can be defined as 'abstract expressionism'. Andrei Lanskoy created carpets, illustrated books, perfected the collage technique, executed an interesting series of gouache works after the Genesis. The artist considered that all forms and colours already exist in the world, we only have to find relations between them.