Seven faces of Basyrov

An art festival dedicated to one artist doesn't happen often. Garif Basyrov (1944-2004) deserved it. Almost simultaneously, his exhibitions open in seven galleries and museums in Moscow. The most amazing thing is that none of them are similar to the other. Sometimes it seems that it could not have been done by the same artist - intimate lyrics and wild non-objectivity, delicate gouaches, illustrations, philosophical hieroglyphs and sculptures archetypal to conceptualism. At the same time, every time he creates an independent myth of man - be it stagnant “people in the corner”, characters of “inhabited landscapes”, timeless “incubus” or manipulated “heads”.

Since this is a whole series of exhibitions, it makes sense to start with the opening days schedule. So, March 14 - Pushkin Museum on Arbat (series "Inhabited Landscapes", "Miniatures", "People in the Corner", "Dialogues" - etchings, drawings, gouaches), Andrei Bely Memorial Apartment on Arbat (drawings for "The Master and Margarita"), gallery "OGI Street" (series "Space" and "Sleeping" - etchings and lithography).

March 15 - Literary Museum in Trubnikovsky Lane (drawings for the magazines "Chemistry and Life", "Kommersant" and others, series "Sport", "Characters"). March 16 - Museum of the East ("Incubus", graphic cycle "Apocrypha"), editorial office of the magazine "Pinakothek" on Malaya Bronnaya (etchings of the 60-70s, cycles "Archaic" and "Narcissus"). March 21 - "Ark" gallery on Nemchinov Street (series "Long Summer", "Space", "Citizens Outside the City", "People with Loads", "Wind", "Miniatures", "Irrelevant", "Heads" - drawings, etchings, lithographs). The timing of exhibitions is different everywhere, but most of April will be covered by them.

The festival was organized through the efforts of the Kovcheg gallery with the assistance of Sberbank of Russia; in the “Ark” the largest and most diverse exhibition of works by Garif Basyrov will unfold, with the exception of the outstanding “Incubuses”, which will be shown at the Museum of the East on Nikitsky Boulevard until the end of March. And the reason for the whole action, in addition to the uniqueness of Basyrov’s gift, was, one might say, an annoying and offensive absurdity. Last year, the Kovcheg gallery presented Basyrov's work at Art Moscow, in which it participated all the years from its very beginning, and received a vague half-rejection. Either the organizing committee does not know contemporary artists other than “their own”, or they were embarrassed by the too great success of the “Ark” exposition at the previous “Art-Moscow - 2005”. In general, Garif Basyrov, judging by the surviving correspondence with the organizers, was recognized as an “irrelevant member of the sixties.” Which is wrong, both in form and content.

Garif Basyrov, in whatever manner he works, accurately expresses the form of today's times. Suffice it to recall the peak of his fame - the series of drawings "Inhabited Landscapes" that were in demand in the perestroika "Moscow News" and "Ogonyok" newspapers. It is worth taking a fresh look at them today in order to understand us then - self-absorbed people whom time carried from nowhere to nowhere.

Another thing is that today’s art process is structured in such a way that, according to the precise definition of the poet and publicist Tatyana Shcherbina, “in today’s art there are, as it were, no artists, but there are moderated communities: contemporary art, mothballs, naive, glamorous, moronic. And those who are individual artists seem to not exist (in the media field, in perception), although in reality they exist.” Garif Basyrov is a separate artist, no matter what frames they try to define him in.

During perestroika, they liked to mention that the artist was born in 1944 in Stalin’s camp #26 (ALZHIR) in the Akmola region of Kazakhstan. In later catalogs, noting that he graduated from the art school at the Surikov Institute in the same class with the current academicians of painting Tatyana Nazarenko and Natalya Nesterova, he was enrolled in the “left MOSH”. Remembering that in the stagnant years he illustrated books and the most stylish magazine of that time, “Chemistry and Life,” they were ready to count him in the workshop of domestic and book graphics, which was unclaimed in the 90s. But the peculiarity of Basyrov’s personality was that he perceived any artistic movement, community, direction, genre as a frozen form, which itself needed development and reworking.

He felt the main thing - the changing time - and looked for artistic forms that could adequately express this time. Is traditional illustration dead? That's where she goes. Being an artist of the European class, he proposed a series of “new graphics”, receiving prizes and recognition at numerous art festivals in Europe in the late 80s - early 90s. In hieroglyphs and cryptograms he encrypted a light, almost eastern nothingness. His sculptural “incubuses” are dozens, hundreds of pieces of iron found in the trash heap, pieces of wood taken from a picket fence - like a dream, a shadow, a hint, similar to the gods of all times and peoples, a ready-made illustration for an encyclopedia of myths. This, again, is the collective unconscious that covered us headlong in the era of the return of the archaic and the simplest instincts. And there is no need for any “varnishing of reality” - our gods and fetishes were taken from the nearest trash heap, carried into the soul by the garbage wind.

His “mail art” is not those colorful envelopes, painted with felt-tip pens, phosphorescent paints, decorated with exotic stamps from different countries, not what has been transformed in the Internet era into pure art for art’s sake. Basyrov exhibits gray blind envelopes, government notices, scraps of old letters - Russian mail will disappear not because of electronic means of communication, but because the environment is stuck and the space has disintegrated, because there is a black hole all around and no one cares. The creative heritage of Garif Basyrov is enormous and open to collection, study, and demonstration. His “mail art” series alone, created in the mid-90s, contains up to five thousand sheets, of which only a few dozen were shown to the public. But at least they were shown. And who saw Garif Basyrov’s drawings for “The Master and Margarita”, created during the first publication of the novel in the mid-60s, when he was completing his studies at the art department of VGIK?

The festival of creativity of Garif Basyrov reveals a powerful, extraordinary artist who fully expressed his time, and therefore all times at once. The master's current form of fame - auctions, collecting, high prices for works - is just beginning for Basyrov. And this, of course, will be facilitated by both the exhibition and the first fundamental publication about the artist, the release of which is timed to coincide with the current exhibition project - “Inhabited Landscapes of Garif Basyrov.”

During his lifetime, he was least concerned with his own “promotion”, defining his “place and role” in modern art. Now he has time for this.

In the illustration:

G. Basyrov. At the event horizon