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18/5/2005

Ilya Tabenkin

Matthew Bown Gallery, London

Paintings

Matthew Bown Gallery is honoured to present the first London exhibition by one of Russia's outstanding artists, Ilya Tabenkin (1914-1988). The exhibition is a joint venture with the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow. Tabenkin's paintings - still-lifes of enigmatic, abstracted figures (hand-made by the artist from clay, plaster and papier-mache), sited in 'landscapes' constructed from paper and cloth - are a unique statement in the Russian art of the late Soviet era. Tabenkin was born in Mozyr, Belorussia. His early life was blighted by Stalinist repression: at the age of twenty, for a trivial offence, he was sentenced first to several years in a concentration-camp and then to internal exile. He managed, miraculously, to enter the Soviet art world during World War II by destroying evidence of his imprisonment and enrolling at the Moscow Art Institute. After the war, he ploughed a lonely furrow. A long apprenticeship as a plein-air painter was followed in the 1960s by concentration in the studio on still-lifes and figure paintings. During this period, he studied closely the work of old and Russian masters: Giotto, Masaccio, Zurbaran, Pirosmani, Tyshler, Falk. In the early 1970s he commenced the series of numinous still-lifes that established him as one of the major Russian painters of the late twentieth century. The exhibition at Matthew Bown Gallery is accompanied by the publication of a 186-page book on the artist, illustrated by approximately 370 colour plates.

Image: Still-Life, 1977, Oil on canvas, 52 x 61.5 cm

Private View: Thursday 19 May, 6.00-8.30 pm

Matthew Bown Gallery
First floor 11
Savile Row London W1S 3PG
Thursday-Friday, 12.00-6.00 pm Saturday 12.00-4.00 pm

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