| After the death of Eduard Gorokhovsky, his new exhibitions are held The next exhibition of the classic Moscow unofficial art Eduard Gorokhovsky in the Fine Art gallery is called “Russian Writers” and was announced as the first show of portraits of Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Gogol and Chekhov, made in the mid-90s, but not made public before. The compositional center of the exhibition was, in fact, elegant and at the same time cocky images of the greats, glued from colored paper. Narcissistic Akhmatova - in a boa, but with bare breasts; the dark and high-cheeked Pasternak showed Pushkin's—that is, Ethiopian—features; on the face of the melancholy Chekhov, the empty eye sockets are replaced by pince-nez glasses...
These works are abundantly supplemented by other works unknown to the public, made in the same years and using the same collage technique - from the painstakingly executed four-part cycle “Family Album” to small-format and plotless things made for oneself. Fleeting, vague images made up of old photographs, official forms, newspaper scraps, scraps of fabric and drips of paint, bypassing the title, turned out to be the main characters. The surprise is not even in that, but in the very fact of showing new and unusual works by an artist who died last summer. However, it was a surprise only for those who did not know Gorokhovsky well.
If we are talking about “Russian writers,” then literary quotes would be appropriate. “Hero of Labor” - this is how Tsvetaeva titled her essay about Bryusov with a bit of sarcasm. This definition also applies to Gorokhovsky, but without any irony. He was distinguished not only by his fantastic ability to work (as evidenced by the collages that appeared during forced breaks in work on paintings), but also by his unbridled passion for experimentation - with techniques, genres and his own destiny.
The architect, who graduated from the institute with honors, suddenly quit his job in 1956 and retrained as a book illustrator, retraining literally on the fly. Then, a respected member of the graphic section of the Union of Artists of the USSR, in 1974 he moved from Novosibirsk to Moscow, joined the camp of nonconformist conceptualists and took up painting, desperately reforming the good old painting with the help of photo aesthetics. When in 1999 the Tretyakov Gallery held a major retrospective of Gorokhovsky, the same “Fine Art” showed his hooligan social-erotic photographs. In 2002, Gorokhovsky, as if on a dare with himself, created a voluminous cycle of works in a year, made on identical sheets of black paper and a standard 50x70 format...
And after the current exhibition, we learned that in the 90s, it turns out, he was fond of semi-abstract collages-appliqués, similar to experiments in mastering Chinese calligraphy, unconsciously first testing on them those playful techniques for crossing photography and traditional art, which he then used in their calculated and verified paintings. After all this, even sarcastic portraits of writers look not just like a domestic, untidy joke, but another attempt to overcome the established canon, where artistic license is combined with professionally sensitive attention to the texture of the paper, its color, and the plasticity of the image.
It is in Fine Art that today one can finally be convinced of Gorokhovsky’s vital love of freedom: the exhibition is accompanied by the album “Illustrations of Memory,” just prepared and published by the artist’s widow. It reproduces drawings made in the year of his death and with a sober premonition of the imminent end. These are everyday sketches, ironic in intonation and reminiscent of either newspaper cartoons or illustrations in the magazine “Yunost” for a satirical story by some liberal Soviet writer. In fact, before us are pictures of Russian life, recreated from memory and with a feeling of the ultimate impossibility of ever returning to it. Gorokhovsky did not feel nostalgia for the world he was leaving behind, because it would have been a constraining feeling that suppressed inner independence. But he also did not have an evil aversion to the sorrowful earthly vale. His drawings are a kind of automatic writing, where emotions are balanced and run from “too human” extremes, be it false sentimentality or vicious hatred.
But among all these graphic humor, towards the end of the album, a familiar image of a skeleton with a scythe in his hands appears. He hugs a good-natured fat man in a suit or rushes him on a horse in a certain direction. The last page in the book is an ironic interpretation of the Ascension: angels lift up a blessed citizen of artistic appearance, and syringes and ampoules float in the air. Joking about one's own death - isn't this a manifestation of not only personal courage, but also the creative freedom that was always inherent in Gorokhovsky?
Only death could stop the seemingly endless experiment that was the whole life of this artist. However, even after his death, exhibitions of Gorokhovsky’s works that have not yet been seen are opened. With his hard work, he deceived the skeleton with the scythe. Truly a hero of labor! Fedor ROMER |
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