Yefim Deshalyt (Ефим Дешалит)

Artist Biography

The Palace Square. Saint Petersburg, 1957, 20×35, oil on board
Sint Petersburg, 1957, 19×35, oil on board
Sint Petersburg. Port, 1957, 18×39, oil on board
View of Peter Paulus fort, 1958, 10×18, oil on board
Fishingboats,1959, 28×70
Gursuf. View of Ayu Dag, 1958, 25×85, oil on canvas

The immense Palace Square in St. Petersburg cannot be captured with a glance, it simply does not fit into the eyes. Yet the artist Yefim Deshalyt managed to do this in a 20×35 cm format while maintaining all sizes and perspectives, everything is here, all the architectural symbols of the Empire of the Russian Tsars: the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum and the Alexandrian Pillar and the Golden Spire of the Admiralty. It succeeded thanks to the professional specialization of the artist, since Yefim Deshalyt (born 1921 – died in 1996) was the creator of historical diorama-panoramic projects. This oil sketch (painted in 1957) is framed as a precious artifact in a box-shaped frame and protected by the finest museum glass.

Tania Kandracienka (Татьяна Кондратенко)

Artist Biography

Tania Kandracienka, Two, 65×70, oil on canvas SOLD!
Tania Kandracienka, Spinario,2022, 120×80, oil on canvas
Tania Kandracienka, Spinario, 2022, 100×80, oil on canvas
Tania Kandracienka, Tug of War, 140×130, oil on canvas
Embrace, 80x90cm, oil on canvas
Tania Kandracienka, Spinario 4, 60х50, oil on canvas
Tania Kandracienka, Blue Tunic, 2020, 100×70, oil on canvas – SOLD!
Tania Kandracienka, Two Boys, 2020, 110х90, oil on canvas – SOLD!

SPINARIO, Boy With Thorn
TANIA KANDRACIENKA (Minsk, Belarus 1980)
New artist at Gallery Lilja Zakirova in Heusden

With great pleasure I invite you, from June 5th, to visit the new painting exhibition of the new artist of the gallery.

Tania Kandracienka is, besides her autonomous artistry, a PhD professor in Classical Drawing Art at the famous Minsk Art Academy and is a highly appreciated representative artist from the Minsk-school from Belarus. This academy has, at the end of the 20th century, launched the careers of a generation of painters called the Minsk-school from which Kandracienka is a part. Her work breaths the typical artistic constellation of this group, in which an excellent painting style is combined with postmodernism where the concept of an artwork carries a highly subjective and layered character.

The SPINARIO, or Boy with Thorn series by Kandraciencka, , with which gallery Lilja Zakirova presents the debut of this artist, points to the famous classical bronze statue from the first century BC from the Capitoline museum in Rome: the sitting, bent forward young men who with careful attention removes a thorn from his foot. It is a sculpture that for centuries has been quoted and followed in arthistory. And also for Tania Kandraciencka it forms the central image in these paintings. The recurring motiv for these canvases is the barefoot boy who’s absorbed in active concentration in own world. Kandraciencka shows a human before becoming estranged from his origin who literally has a connection with the earth, “a man without blemishes, from head to toe”, as Spinario was once characterized in the 12th century.

In addition the extraordinary painting technique by Kandraciencka is characterized by an outspoken use of colors. At a first glance the works seem relatively monochrome yet through a playful use of clair-obscur display a wide nuance of one specific color. Thus creating a sculptural dimension in each individual painting as if it was constructed from many illuminated facets like a cut gemstone. With these elements the level of an intrinsic relation between shape and substance of her famous inspiration is embedded in her work.

I am looking forward to sharing my admiration for the appealing work of this new artist in the gallery with you!

Katerina Belkina (Катерина Белкина) ‘Dream Walkers. Imagery of Change’ series

Katerina Belkina, Frau Holle. Whisper, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Film on Youtube by Katerina Belkina “Dream Walkers and Magic Things” (click to open)
Katerina Belkina, Silence. Frau Holle, 130×95, Photography, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Snow White. Obsession. photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Snow White. Stepmother, photography, 90x65cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, The Frog Prince, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Snow White and Rose Red, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Cinderella, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Three Spinners, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8
Katerina Belkina, Three Men in the Snow, photography, 75x100cm, edition 8

In the Dream Walkers. Imagery of Change series the artist focused herself on the old mythology and uses the art of storytelling from the fairy tales of the European continent to ask herself and the viewer existential questions. The universal myth lived through personally, diving to the motivational depth of the heroin (SnowWhite, Frau Holle, Sleeping Beauty and many others) and at the same time surging to the awareness of the archetype, Katerina Belkina is able to concentrate herself on the (sometimes invisible) magical momentum on the eve of transformation or transition to the next mental level by which the artist achieved to create mesmerizing monumental compositions that remind of cinematographic stills with the essential equal participant – the landscape.
Regeneration and transformation are the instruments of success by Consulting Bureau Target Point, the second exposition space for Katerina Belkina’s series. Target Point, for 30 years an innovator in training and consulting within human resourcing, has actively used the language of the visual arts in their trainings and bestselling Guide to Change.
Accompanying this exhibition a new catalogue “Imagery of Change” is published by Target Point.

Katerina Belkina (Катерина Белкина) ‘Zweiraum-wohnung’ series

Katerina Belkina, 11 Milliliter per minute, photography, 45×45, edition 15
Katerina Belkina, Kitchen Story, photography, 45×45,edition 15
Katerina Belkina, Sunday Morning, photography, 45×45, edition 15
Katerina Belkina, Revelation of Venus, photography, 45×45,edition 15

Zweiraumwohnung

A two-room apartment is not just the most common type of a city home; it also represents a coordinate system for a typical urbanite. More than a half of my life I spent in two-room apartments. The world is becoming more open to doing business, communicating, traveling, and establishing connections, and yet our life is becoming more and more secluded.

The world seems compressed to the size of a small apartment. Day in and day out our bodies are living through the motion within one or two spaces at the most, and on the route between them. Each day starts with a certain ritualized sequence of actions.

At the same time, our minds are pondering over and sorting out global political conflicts, economic crises, information wars or actual wars. Our minds are traveling around the world and communicating with those of the others no matter how far apart they are. Our minds are processing tons of data about totally strange people and places. We are passively participating in the life of the global community, and our participation has no geography while our physical actions certainly have.

This very dissonance splits ourselves more and more evidently into two separate rooms, that of the mind and that of the body.

The photographic background of each piece of the project was shot in this or that corner of the dwelling where my life revolves.

The video works as a peeping hole of sorts or as a window across the street through which one can watch or rather spy on my daily not at all special actions, on my fussing around or my slowing down and hear the latest news or a five-minute meditation track.

Like an astronaut on a spaceship, I wake up and start my daily routine. I work, I get my chores done, care about my family and then I’m out on my spacewalk into orbit‒ on the internet. I get connected to the rest of the world and rest while absorbing information, watching the lives of the others, thinking about serious social issues. It is so mundane and so strange at the same time. Thirty years ago, the world was a completely different place. This period seems a turning point.

The video consists of three parts each of which ends with a moment depicted in a graphic piece.

Raoef Mamedov (Рауф Мамедов) · Double Suicide or Friedrich Nietzsche writes a love letter to Cosima Wagner

Just as they did for The Last Supper, the work which meant Raoef Mamedov’s international breakthrough at the prestigious international contemporary and modern art fair ArtBasel in 1999, Mamedov’s experiences as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Russia formed the immediate cause and the concrete background for this double quintych from 2016. The deplorable, desperate conditions of the patients and the cynical and fatalistic attitude of doctors and nurses form his first clear source of inspiration. In his story The Soldier, Mamedov tells us of a completely bewildered and deranged soldier who has to be permanently constrained strapped to a metal hospital bed and who eventually dies at the hands of the equally desperate hospital staff. The story is an allegory for La Condition Humaine, and the existential primal fears and urges for power and submission that go along with this Human Condition.

With his dark and piercing imagery Raoef Mamedov refers to both a Judeo-Christian iconography as well as to the northern expressionism of Edvard Munch. Jacob’s Ladder, dating back to the Old Testament, should provide an escape from our human tragedies and open up the possibility of reaching paradise, but instead coincides with the cross Christ is strapped to; Christ who should lead us to salvation from suffering, while Judas’s suicide is inseparably connected to Christ’s death. In the wounded chained figures at both ends of the double series we recognise the soldier from Mamedov’s story; their eccentric placement in the quintych refers to Dismas and Gestas, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ murderers that supposedly flanked Christ on mount Golgotha. In the darkness that forms the backdrop of the scene, Time loses all meaning.

At the same time we are confronted with the three life phases of woman, the same stages Munch so explicitly depicted in his work Woman in three stages (1894). The vulnerable purity and innocence of the young girl, who in Mamedov’s work is still receptive to Dismas’ cry, stands next to the alluring adult woman, who has understood that silence protects her fatigue, while the old woman realises all she has left to cling onto life with is her suitcase.
Insight into the degeneration of human existence and the reversal of things in people’s perceptions, which blurs the meaning of the concept truth, are depicted by Mamedov again in the fourth and fifth panels of the quintych. The three men have swapped clothes and attributes, making the doctor no longer the doctor, the nurse no longer the nurse and the patient no longer the patient. With this, the artist draws a parallel with the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proposed a perspectivist epistemology. Nietzsche argues there is no absolute, objective truth. The perspective is temporarily true for the person who designed the perspective. In this sense, the glasses worn by some of the depicted characters also refer to the great German philosopher, who went practically blind at the end of his life, but also made a significant left-turn in his way of thinking at that point.
Mamedov appeals to the archetypical experience of the observer. And like the other doctor in The Soldier, who could calm his patients and get them to reflect on themselves by showing them their own image, Mamedov’s work once again makes us look at ourselves in the mirror.

Marike van der Knaap, art historian
’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, May 2017

Raoef Mamedov (Рауф Мамедов) · Pieta

Raoef Mamedov, Pieta, Photography, 2005 (click to enlarge)

The photographical series titled Pietà (2005) by Raoef Mamedov forms the closing of his trilogy which started with The Last Supper and The Games on the Window Sills.
It is no secret that the main theme of the Pietà – the grieving after Christ has been taken from the cross – has often been depicted by many different artists, with which each artlover is familiar. The cycle here displayed by Raoef Mamedov is flooded with quotes. Besides references to the Pietà there is also a clear homage to the famous painting by Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
It is perhaps superfluous to mention that, just as before, the artist used people with Down’s syndrome to pose for him. Within the supposed contamination of the interior of an operating room and a anatomical cabinet the actors illustrate, dressed in medical uniforms, a new lecture of an old story. The visual quotes in the work are like the splinters of one large transcript.
The wealth of metaphors and echoes of meaning guide the more experienced viewer to Mamedov’s beloved theme of the so-called ‘schizoanalysis’, as described by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to this doctrine the diseased society is meeting resistance by a group of outcasted individuals (who are placed in one group together with criminals and artists by Deleuze and Guattari). With their whole being they express their skeptical views on the exclusiveness of the ruling standards, language and logic.
Within the frameworks of this ‘schizofrenic discours’ the characters bring us closer to the intriguing theme of the definition and the comprehension of the self through the other. The carnivalesque aspect of the depiction, his deviation of the original and the parodying tone reveal the weak spots and shortages in a worldview that once made sense. At the same time the allegoric level of the presentation draws our attention inward to our own thoughts and identity.
Mamedov renounces every tendency towards standardization. Using his actors he allows the viewer access to ‘fragmented truths’. By the childlike innocence with which the characters play the staged mystery, we are forced to think about the potential quantity of possible interpretations. Their natural naivety attests an entire layer of reflective skills that are unknown to us. Together the people with Down’s syndrome form a choir that brings dissonants in the original monopoly of the standard reading of cultural codes.
Raoef Mamedov in his own words
As we know Pieta literally means compassion. Within the iconography we usually mean the lamentation of Christ. With this work I tried to sneak up on the most important theme – the crucifixion. To me this seemed the right direction. Every panel of this pentaptych has its own specific meaning. In short:
The first part. Here is the depiction of the half-blind, old guard Longinus, who with his long spear penetrated Christ’s side. His spear is (in crucifiction scenes) guided in the right direction by a young soldier. Het receives the cup (the grail) with the liquid that is gathered from Christ’s wound by Joseph of Arimathea. Next to him stands the lamenting mother. She has no time for the miracles that are performed by the miraculous liquid from the grail. She professes pity for her dead son in an extremely human manner.
The second part. Here we see Peter with the rooster, who has forever lost his mind. And the ghost of Judas who, in the figure of the pathologist, is about the perform an autopsy on the body of Christ. And finally the mourning, youthful James.
The third part. Here all is clear. The lamp above the operating table as the all-seeing eye of God, and at the same time the postmodern irony of it.
The fourth part. As we remember from Iconography the negative figures are displayed on the left of Christ. In this case this is where the registration of the nails, that are taken from Christ’s body, takes place. To this day theologists are having arguments about the amount of nails with which Christ was crucified – was it three or four? Meanwhile a nurse writes the name of the deceased on a toe-tag.
The fifth part. These are the three criminals, fighting amongst themselves about the cloth of Christ.

Socialist Realist paintings

Artist Biography

Click to view the Catalogue from “Het Russische Landschap”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis ac bibendum metus, et pharetra leo. Aliquam ut iaculis quam. Nam ex purus, interdum ut arcu porttitor, porta placerat turpis. Cras euismod eros nisi, sed sollicitudin purus lobortis id. Donec a nibh neque. Curabitur massa tellus, lobortis nec velit in, eleifend bibendum augue. Ut at velit tortor. Quisque ac ipsum nibh. Fusce vestibulum id lorem ac cursus. Suspendisse ut enim feugiat, pellentesque ante eget, luctus lorem. Aenean suscipit orci enim, malesuada porta mauris viverra eget. Fusce aliquet et urna ac vestibulum. Ut consequat massa urna, quis convallis ex ultricies sit amet.

Vitaly Puschnitsky (Виталий Пушницкий)

Artist Biography

Vitaly Puschnitsky – Eternal Child, 120×90 cm, oil on canvas

Vitaly Pushnitsky was born in 1967 in Leningrad. 1994 — graduated from The Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, graphics faculty; is a member of the Union of Artists of St Petersburg since 1994. Lives and works in St Petersburg, Russia. Creates works of paintings, graphics, sculpture and installations. Works are represented in state and private collections.

Museum Collections and Foundations

Ekaterina Foundation. Moscow, Russia

Breus Foundation. Moscow, Russia

ArtLink. New York, USA

Chairman, Aldrich Museum of Art. New York, USA

Contemporary Art Museum art4.ru. Moscow, Russia

Freud’s Dream Museum. St Petersburg, Russia

Kala Art Institute. Berkeley, San Francisco, USA

Kolding Art Institute. Kolding, Denmark

Kolodzei Art Foundation, Highland Park, NJ, USA

Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Russia

Novy Museum. St Petersburg, Russia

PERMM Modern Art Museum. Perm, Russia

Red Bull Collection, Salzburg, Austria

RuArts Foundation. Moscow, Russia

The Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre. Krasnoyarsk, Russia

The Museum of Contemporary Art ERARTA. St Petersburg, Russia

The National Centre of Contemporary Art. Moscow, Russia

The State Kaliningrad Art Gallery. Kaliningrad, Russia

The State Novosibirsk Art Museum. Novosibirsk, Russia

The State Russian Museum. St Petersburg, Russia

1 2 3 4