Translated material
Flowers from "Grail"
A car accident, months in a hospital bed, difficulties in returning to the profession. In our country (and it is possible that everywhere), details from the lives of people of art are often used as a tool to increase interest in creativity itself. Remember how many times, for example, have you read or hear that Shilov worked in a furniture factory in his youth, dreaming of becoming a real artist. Such stories should be treated with some skepticism: biography of biography, and talent is another matter. But the case of Irina Baklanova is completely special.
Her exhibition, arranged on the top floor of the Central House of Artists in a small pledge between the real estate fair and a rather dubious show of young Americans, stops - even with the external tradition of the images presented and banal weight. Because there are in these works, performed with an amazing feeling of coloring and generally an understanding of the professional parameters of painting, something that should not be sought in the works of authors trying to mechanically cross painting and relevance. One is given an understanding of the material, the other remains to talk about the abolition of the quality category in contemporary art. There are no portraits at the exhibition, more and more landscapes and still lifes are genre, for a long time and for a long time untimely: Mikhail Shemyakin also liked to repeat in his first interviews to return to his homeland that he did not write flowers at all.
And Baklanova writes; More precisely, I wrote - there is no conversation about returning to exercises for painting yet. Moreover, the opportunity to see its canvases of the previous years, provided by the Grail Gallery, is not the most famous, but rather consistent in its sympathies to the easel art. The biography of the artist is also not the most sonorous: Irina Baklanova was born in Ukraine, and since 1979 she lived and worked in Siberia. There, in Krasnoyarsk, she studied the craft and joined the Union of Artists, began to participate in exhibitions. For six years she worked as a teacher of a children's art school in Lesosibirsk, since 1991 he has been living in Moscow. The list of “main exhibitions” published in the Grail published by the Grail is small. However, in a professional environment she is known and appreciated; Soon after the accident, a group of people who are not next to their business organized a charitable exhibition and sale to help a colleague in trouble. It would seem that in the days of the current retrospective and for Russian museums it was the time to pay attention to the Baklanovsky canvases: Pavel Tretyakov, for example, collected the works of his contemporaries primarily. However, so far not one of Baklanova’s works, it seems, has yet acquired. But before the closing of the exhibition, only nine days are left.
11/17/2005 The material was published in the "newspaper" No. 219 dated November 18, 2005.