13 Jun - 27 Jun 14
NUDA VERITAS
Under the Soviet regime, portraying a nude model carried the risk that the artist could be declared to be in the throes a decadent crisis and lacking in the required ideological zeal. Nevertheless, artists did portray the human body, sometimes calling these works – in a generalised and not unambiguous way – life studies, as if announcing the title of a compulsory figure-drawing class and officially rejecting any suggestion of the erotic and the sensual.
The task of state ideology at that time – consisting in the inculcation of a certain social and aesthetic awareness in the people – entailed the extolling of progress and equality of the sexes. The type taken as the ideal was the woman worker, the female collective farmer, participating alongside the man in the building of socialism and, ultimately, communism. But there was also another reality which complicated the artist's work – the still-extant western patriarchal tradition, in which women were represented in an altogether different way and did not play a leading role in society.
In the NUDA VERITAS collection, the earliest work is dated 1974: this is an expressionist representation of a sportswoman, a large-scale canvas (201x146 cm) by Ashraf Murad. He, together with a small number of artists who are represented here, Javad Mirjavadov, Rasim Babayev and Kamal Ahmed, were the few who set about rethinking late modernism under the conditions of Soviet censorship, laying the ground for the liberalisation of art within that context – a unique citizens' action. At that time, unofficial art expressed counter-reactions to the ideological art of Socialist Realism, and also served as a connecting link to the processes at work in western art, embracing a different artistic experience, far removed in terms of political convictions. The dissident culture of the former Soviet republics, by expressing its opposition, recognised the reality of existential problems and asserted values that were ignored by the official regime. The public representation of individual, private experience was, in itself, an act of opposition. In this sense, interest in the human body as a medium for expressing subjective vision, personal experience and the as yet undiscovered possibilities of matter, led to a unique representation of the understanding of truth.
This process became more open and the quest more diverse during perestroika and the euphoria of the 1990s; in the works of Altai Sadikhzadeh, human figures collectively reveal the predominant energy of the subconscious – a very current concern at the time of their creation; Huseyn Haqverdi represents an archetypal laconicism; MirNadir Zeynalov's quest for form binds the body within an authentic context; in the work of Sabina Shikhlinskaya, the plasticity of the line articulates an introspective depth; on Eldar Kurban's canvases, the fantastic and the rational merge into a unity growing out of the artist's meditations on the essence of female nature.
The unifying element in the work of the representatives of this generation - the currently active artists who began their careers under the Soviet regime and have lived through all the hardships of the period of transformation in their country and in society - is the representation by each one of them of his or her own version of a conceptual vision and specific perception of the processes and conditions of censorship or relative freedom of action. They are already presenting the theme of the body under different conditions and in a different way; for them the nude figure is one of the many channels for expressing their artistic ideas. This fresh approach has raised new questions on the perception of the female body by viewers who have themselves been caught up in a process of change and new experiences: who is this new woman? What can serve as the embodiment of a symbol woven from the collapse of the old order, the contradictions and the search for ideals in the ruins of the post-Soviet period? Where is the source of such rich variety of form and line in the female body as portrayed in the works of the artists in this exhibition?
The answers to these and other questions can be found only by journeying into the world of the individual artistic systems of the painters represented in the NUDA VERITAS project – artists of various generations, styles and world views, each of whom creates his or her own version of the conceptual vision and specific perception of processes at the intersection of life and art, showing a quality of openness and sincerity in relation to the specific theme of the human body, as an eternal metaphor for the endless discussion of Truth.
Samira Sefi
Exhibition Curator