New Art from Belarus


Galerie Eurasia, 1–30 April 2004

In the history of visual arts, Belarus is, of course, famous for Marc Chagall
and the Vitebsk school of painting. There may, however, not be very much
Chagallesque in the contemporary painting of Belarus, but nevertheless
Belarus continues to be an interesting country as regards visual arts.

The culture of creativity and craftsmanship has, first of all, been held
vibrant by the Minsk Academy of Visual Arts – a famous art school that not
only trained several generations of artists in Belarus but also in the entire
Soviet Union.

Belarus has had a different and more gradual transition from the Soviet
socialism to the market society than most of the other countries of the
former Soviet Union, and this gradualism is clearly reflected also on the art
scene. These is a clearer sense of continuity between the Soviet past and
the present that, for instance, in the neighbouring Russia, and the break-up
with the socialist realist past does not seem so absolute. There is less
flirtation with conceptual art and post-modernism, and instead, one can
observe certain faithfulness to the basic principles of the socialist formalism.

Continuity needs not, however, mean rigorous attachment to the past.
There is a striking variety of different artistic styles in Belarus, the
landscape painting being, of course, the most dominant one due to the
magnificent school of landscape painters. More often than in Western
Europe or in Russia, Belorussian painting takes flight to the realm of the
private, praising the bodily and the sensual or describing in tender tones
family life and the sphere of the domestic.

Human suffering is also a theme that is often repeated in the work of
Belorussian painters. This has to do both with the tragedy of an individual –
or the existential dilemma of being an individual, as the pictures have often
an austere philosophical dimension – and the tragedy of an entire society
that seems to be at the mercy of external forces. In this respect, the works
of many Belorussian artists resemble those of their Polish colleagues. The
question is not merely about geographic and cultural vicinity, but this
similarity is in the first place due to the shared traumatic history in the both
countries.

In Belarus, this apprehension of tragedy has also a third dimension: an
ecological one. For a number of painters, the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl
is a recurring theme, demanding the artist to express his or
her protest against the powerlessness of an individual in the face of
destructive forces, be these forces brought about by fascist invaders or
faceless technocracy.

The selection in the Galerie Eurasia exhibition in 2004 may be somewhat
eclectic, putting on display a broad front of well-known painters from
Belarus. The pictures range from the delightful and
sensual water colours of Dmitri Sourinovich to the stern and surrealist oil
paintings of Georgi Skripnichenka and the exquisite landscapes of Anatoli
Baranovski. In addition to these masters, this Brussels exhibition puts also
on display pictures by Yuri Gavrin, Vladimir Kojoukh, Tatiana Radzivilko and
Vladimir Zinkevich.