Olga Tobreluts. Emperor and Galilean

The exhibition shows 54 Olga Tobreluts' works concerned with the drama "Emperor and Galilean" by a great Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen, on the occasion to the bicentennial of the writer. Three years ago a group of Norwegian representatives, which included attache and cultural representatives of Norway in Russia, art historians and board of directors of the Centre for Study of Literary Heritage of Henrik Ibsen, offered an artist from St Petersburg, Olga Torbeluts, to start a project to visualize a famous drama by the Norwegian writer Caesar and Galilean. This play, written in early 1870s after the Franco-Prussian War and Commune of Paris, Henrik Ibsen formed his own philosophy of history, the key element of which is a claim for would-be synthesis of spiritual and fleshly principles of the human history. This is the last Ibsen's play where such generalized philosophical vision of the world is given. Having graduated from an Architectural technical school in 1989, Olga Tobreluts undertook a course of Computer Graphics in the Institute Art+Com in Berlin in 1991. Since 1993 the artist has been participating in international and Russian contests of electronic art. Olga Tobreluts' oeuvre developed in contact with that of St Petersburg artist and theorist Timur Novikov, whose last period of oeuvre is characterized as "recreancy", since he rejects the idea of actual art and returns to ancient ideals. However, despite having been influenced by him as a person and by his ideas, Olga Tobreluts as an artist succeeded in developing on her own. She managed to become a classical post-modern pastiches author. The genre of pastiches combines various sources treated ironically. Olga Tobreluts sees the "universal drama" of Henrik Ibsen not only as a drama of ideas, as a collision of ideologies, but also wants to show those historical and cultural circumstances which influenced or could influence the writer when he was creating his drama.