Michael Odnoralov: Alice From the Lower East Side
The golden age of the Russian avant-garde in the early decades of the century gave the world such artists as Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, Popova and Larionov. Banned in the late twenties, modern art vanished until 1956 when the first exhibition of Picasso was held at the Moscow State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, along with shows of Cezanne and the Impressionist painters. The exhibition displayed works of art that had been hidden from the public view in the back rooms of Soviet museums for more than three decades. Soon after, the Festival of Youth and Students came to Moscow. Both artists and the public discovered the existence of Jackson Pollack and became fascinated with abstract art, Tachism, Neo-Plasticism and Surrealism.
Odnoralov, together with other young artists, gained access to contemporary art while attending the festival’s workshop. There, the young generation of Soviet artists could communicate for the first time with foreign artists while absorbing new ideas. This started the development of a new wave of Russian avant-grade exhibitions. Odnoralov participated in the first exhibitions of the new Russian avant-grande in the sixties and then appeared regularly in a number of shows through the mid-seventies. With the so-called “Khrushchev’s thaw” artists received a kind of freedom — to the extent that freedom was possible under a communist regime — to explore artistic ideas.
From the sixties on, Odnoralov’s metaphysical spiritual realism became an inseparable part of the new wave of Russian avant-garde and he played a significant role in the artistic life of Moscow. As a chairman of the Initiative Group for Protection of Artist’s Rights, Odnoralov (together with Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid and Oscar Rabin) organized a series of apartment and studio exhibitions that became no less significant than the Bulldozer Exhibition for the development of Russian contemporary art in 1970’s. By the end of the seventies the government once again began to restrict the freedom of artists and many of the avant-grande with whom Odnoralov had worked for over two decades, left the country. In 1979, Odnoralov immigrated to the U.S.A.
Odnoralov’s series, “Alice from the Lower East Side” was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces, Through the Looking Glass, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It deals with intercultural coexistence and is set in the neighborhood where the artist had lived until recently and where he still works. The series presents an adolescent girl in a period of passage. Like Alice’s passage through the looking glass, these paintings operate with the logic of dreams, metaphorically providing connections. The imagery is fragmented. A young girl is depicted with symbols of childhood and innocence and those of adult awakening.
Odnoralov’s art spiritual in its essence, deals with metaphysical issues as well as purely visual ones. Michael Odnoralov was a pupil of Robert Falk, one of the last important Russian painters of the early twentieth century avant-garde era and a teacher with a passion for the school of Cezanne. Those who know the artist’s work will be amazed by the metamorphosis that has taken place in the last decade. These works describe a transition and entry into a new life which draws upon the old and completely reconfigures it.
This exhibition curated by Alexandre Gertsman is accompanied by a color catalogue with essays by Robert C. Morgan and Elizaveta Plavinskaya.
