Boy in the sun
In Usolie, the Stroganov Chamber Museum is hosting an exhibition of sculpture and graphics by Olga Muravina, a well-known Moscow artist.
Olga Muravina is among the artists who have sufficient weight and reputation in the professional environment and, to a certain extent, shape the image of contemporary art in Russia. She actively works both in traditional materials and experiments with the most modern technologies in search of new plastic forms, clearly maintaining and leading her own recognizable creative line. The main themes of her work are children, animals, and toys.
The “children” theme develops under the inspiration of her own children. A reverent, attentive attitude to the child as a creature cognizing the world with primary, unbiased consciousness, traces its growth and formation. As if to protect him from unnecessary things, she immerses him in a semi-sleep as behind a veil from harsh rays and loud sounds.
The parallel theme of “beasts” sounds like a social, or rather asocial, manifesto. The gallery of images of animals appears in its unprotected form. We enter their world through Olga’s work and see them from the side, where animals can be calm, let us get close and even pet them. Both themes gradually merge into a single polyphony of promotion and affirmation of the natural origin. Olga Muravina’s work reveals a life-affirming scenario, in which there are no negative influences of society on the individual personality. From this fertile context of creativity gradually crystallizes a new theme – toys. It arose from the transformation of images of animals, their adaptation to the children’s consciousness, which eventually leads to the identity of real and fictional creatures in children’s perception. Toys become even more real than their real prototypes and, as a consequence, the formation of the child’s worldview is based on the materialized artifacts of mythology. Children grow up with toys and images of toys in the system of values become the most significant and fundamental. Therefore, this topic comes to the foreground, becoming its main subject of research.
After a series of successful exhibitions in Moscow and Europe, Olga Muravina, unexpectedly, accepted the offer to hold an exhibition in the Urals in Usolie in the museum “Stroganov Chambers”. “Boy on the Sun” is the title of one of the last, and most iconic, in the opinion of the author’s work. This title reads dual meaning. On the one hand we see a boy basking in the sunlight, he is like a flower turned to the sun, absorbing its energy, and as if all thoughts and feelings he is aspired to it. On the other hand, he is so immersed in the world of his own luminous sensations that one can say that he is on his own planet, warm and shining like the sun, and the light comes from himself. It is a characteristic feature of Olga Muravina’s works to extrapolate the internal emotional state into external imagery and vice versa.
The opening of the exhibition in the town of Usolie in Stroganov’s chambers was attended by the entire beau monde, the mayor, local TV channels, radio stations and printed media. In the hall filled to capacity, art historians, critics and organizers of the exhibition gave speeches about different facets of Muravinsky’s art.
In the darkened vaulted hall of the Stroganov Chambers reality was refracted.
You open the door and enter another world. You don’t feel it in your mind, but in your spinal cord and every cell of your body. You find yourself in a seemingly familiar situation, but one that you could not have imagined before. In front of you are characters from some familiar and at the same time unfamiliar mythology, the animals and little people, depicted realistic and solidly, in the technique of the old masters. They are like museum relics of an unknown civilization. So similar to us, but fundamentally different. No vanity, only depth and wisdom. Consciousness wanders vainly through the labyrinths of memory, trying to find the genealogy of images. But it’s useless, they have absorbed the first impressions of childhood, the researches of an inquisitive naturalist and echoes of the cultures of ancient civilizations. The exhibition is built like a theatrical set. Mysterious faces look out from the walls and arches as from Renaissance frescoes. From one arch a four-meter-tall boy peeks out from another a toy hare, a pensive dog passes through a third. The sculptures, the drawings, and the audience are all immersed in pensiveness. The huge images on the walls are enlarged drawings by Olga. These drawings serve as working materials for the sculptures, but at the same time they are absolutely self-valuable and are regarded as another facet of the artist’s talent. Olga Muravina’s work can be described as sensual hyper-realism. The virtuoso performance is not the main thing in the works, it is perceived as a given and is not considered as a special merit. The artist goes further, playing with the transformation and layering of images to create the necessary psychological portrait of his characters. In this subtle play the line between reality and fiction is lost. The characters blend charm and humor with hyper-seriousness and even drama. These funny little animals and little people live in the real world, and fully care about it.