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ALEKSEJ E SERGEJ TKACEV, RUSSIAN IMPRESSIONISM MASTERS
1 December 2017 @ 00:00
Unanimously considered by critics as among the major representatives of post-war Russian painting, the Tkacev brothers are exponents of Russian realism of the 1950s and 1960s, largely contaminated by the Soviet Impressionism that went through the twentieth until the 21st century. It is an artistic current that sincerely adheres to the traditional academic setting, recalling impressionist experience and filtering it through individual sensitivity.
Born in a small village in today’s Bryansk region, Sergej (1922) and Aleksej (1925) Tkachev belong to the generation that the Second World War has indelibly marked. The conflict forced them to grow fast and to take awareness of a passion that unites them: painting. After academic studies in Moscow, the two brothers work independently, but from 1950 they also start painting four hands, creating extraordinary masterpieces. Each of them has his own personality, his own style, and his creative force: Sergey prefers large canvases and sharp brushes, Aleksej is more lyrical and loves drawing. From the synthesis of these qualities, combined harmoniously in the same canvas, the artistic phenomenon of the Brothers Tkacev is born. All their production, from the beginning to the latest, is distinguished by a special attention to the surrounding reality. On show there are their favourite subjects, those drawn from the daily country life, inspired by their childhood, from the Russian countryside. The protagonists are real people, relatives, friends, neighbors who embody the national character, heroes in virtue of their “normality”. Most of paintings are individual works, including some studies for important works such as The Laundry (1957) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Odessa, Potato Harvest (1967)at the Museum of Oryol and The Daily Work (1974) at the Museum of Kalinin.
Their works are in a lot of museums around the world including, in Moscow, the Tret’jakov Gallery and the Institute of Russian Realist Art (IRRA), with a whole hall dedicated to them, the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg and of course their “museum”, the Tkacev Brothers Museum in Brjansk. Their paintings were exhibited at the Smithsonian International Gallery in Washington and the Guggenheim of New York. In 2011 the Tret’jakov Gallery dedicated to them an important retrospective entitled Brothers Tkachevs. About the Motherland.
The exhibition will be open until mid-January 2018.
