Nikolai Ovchinnikov

Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Kiel, 1990

Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, 1988
Kiel, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Perestrojka: Neue Bilder aus Moskau, 30 May - 8 July 1989

Original canvas. There is some light surface dirt and some small shreds of tissue paper stuck to the centre. There is some light scuffing in places. UV light reveals no retouching. Held in a gold painted plaster frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Nikolai Ovchinnikov is best known for his large-scale compositions of Russian and Western masterpieces re-envisaged. In the offered lot, the artist transforms one of the greatest eighteenth century landscape paintings in The State Tretyakov Gallery, View of the Palace Quay from the Peter and Paul Fortress (1794) by Fedor Alekseev, interlacing it with symbols of Soviet power. Here the red mass of the armoured cruiser Aurora literally pierces through Alexeev's silent world, the conceptual embodiment of the shot which signalled the start of the October Revolution in 1917.

 

The harsh stripes glimpsed through the clouds suggest on the one hand the railings along the quayside, but on the other symbolise the bars of the metaphorical prison which descended on Russia shortly after the Revolution, embodied in its extreme form by the Gulag. Ovchinnikov's composition contains a multitude of complex semantic layers merged into a new visual space.