Olga Tobreluts

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner circa 2000

Neo-academism was founded by the artist Timur Novikov in St Petersburg at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. During his short life which blazed brightly like a comet, Novikov achieved at least two revolutions in art, first adopting a new aesthetic based on the avant-garde in the 1980s and founding the New Artists, he then eulogised beauty and the Classical in the Neo-academist movement of the 1990s. Combining ideas from ‘sign perspective’ and photomontage theory, which was invented in the 1920s by the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, the artist created his own original approach. His method of re-arranging semantic perspective, and use of symmetry and a horizontal, more rarely diagonal, division of space was to become the foundation of his work. A small sign, whether a ship, a Christmas tree or a skier, placed on the surface of the fabric or canvas transforms it into a sea, a forest, a snow-covered slope.

Neo-academism began with a series of collages Timur Novikov created in 1988 and dedicated to Oscar Wilde. The beginning of Neo-academism is sometimes given as 1987, when Novikov painted Boy with a Paddle – a portrait of the artist Georgy Gurianov, parodying Stalinist garden sculpture. The concept of Neo-academism itself, as well as the New Academy of Fine Arts, appeared in 1990. The first academics were friends of Novikov, the artists Georgy Gurianov, Andrei Medvedev, Denis Egelsky. The New Academy declared its task to be the revival of classical traditions, which, according to its founder, had been lost not only by the artists of the avant-garde, but also by the official Academy of Arts, based in St Petersburg since the 18th century. In the drama Secret Cult, written in 1992 in the style of Wilde, Novikov spoke of the eternal values ​​of art and of its lost golden age, when the ideals of beauty were accessible to the audience. Neo-academism originated within a specific historical and geopolitical context and in St Petersburg, the most European of Russian cities, famed for its Imperial architecture, museums, classical ballet. Neo-academism in its own way reflected the aesthetic tastes of the emerging middle class, the so-called New Russians. At the time of its origin Novikov referred to it wittily as ‘New Russian Classicism’. According to Novikov, the movement was called to reveal the true face of the new Russian culture which had abandoned its own distinctive nature after the fall of the Iron Curtain and its introduction to contemporary Western culture. New Russian Classicism is the great tale of opposition to the American culture of Coca-Cola and McDonald's, the reunification of high and low, mass and artistic cultures, based on the opposition of Europe and the USA.

Neo-academism was founded on ​​the ideal image, a concept which was understood differently by each artist. In his textile collages and photomontages Novikov focused on reframing images from art history. Gurianov turned to the work of the Socialist Realist artists like Alexander Deineka and Alexander Samokhvalov. Gurianov’s protagonists are the ideal citizens of a totalitarian empire, embodying the socially-useful functions of aviator, athlete, tractor driver, naval officer. Olga Tobreluts turned to symbols of beauty from both art history and mass media. In 1993, Tobreluts created a series of computer collages entitled Imperial Reflection in which she appears as a Classical muse against a background decorated with historical images. The world of digital technology merges with the ideals of classical beauty in a utopian space symbolising the collapse of empires, the mortality of political regimes and the timelessness of architectural masterpieces.

We are grateful to Dr Olesya Turkina, curator and critic, for providing this catalogue note.