"Constructing E–Emotions: Vladimir Andreyenkov"
2003-04-16 until 2003-04-26
IKRA Gallery
Mayfair, London, , UK United Kingdom

‘You are always so gloomy and your pictures are so happy.’ His wife often says to Vladimir Andreyenkov. An art expert said once that Russian artists achieve profundity through sorrow, melancholy, through meditation upon life and death… ‘I don’t believe it. If a person lives, eats, sings, makes love – what sorrow is there?’ Andreyenkov muses about the content of his works, his geometric abstraction is often considered to be emotional.

After the demise of Stalin, abstract art made an official return to Russia. Many artists stopped being realists overnight. Trained in the classical tradition of fine art for thirteen years, Andreyenkov’s journey into abstract art has been prolonged and deliberate. For Vladimir, rejecting his education would mean rejecting himself. The two decades that followed found the artist deeply engrossed in experimentation, a period in which he questioned his own expression as either a figurative or an abstract painter. A number of those works are presented in the gallery as works on paper, from the 60’s through to the 80’s.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a group of oil on canvas from the 1990’s, eight works in total. Since 1988, Andreyenkov has finally started producing purely abstract works. The ‘Accords’ series (quradrangular forms composed on a maximum of 3 colours), entitled A to D, has been highly focused for over fifteen years. Andreyenkov explained, ‘It’s better not to enlarge your scope, but to restrict your exploration, imparting new content to the same structures. Such exploration reveals a deeper meaning of the structure.’ Two works from series B and three from series C will be on show. The other three works are from his ‘Colour Constructions’ series, in which Andreyenkov constructs space and tone by using just one colour.

Andreyenkov dislikes definitions and theory in his art, but his anecdote sums up his intention as an artist, ’I (once) had a solo exhibition… There was a man who kept going from picture to picture. And then he said: “I can’t understand anything, it all seems nonsense, but it really affects me.”’ Andreyenkov smiled.

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