Igor Melnikov at the Grace Museum Catalog

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igor melnikov

Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com Š2019 Turner Carroll Gallery Essay: Annie Kiyonaga Design: Shastyn Blomquist Photography: courtesy of the artist Front Cover: Outpost, 2016 acrylic on canvas 39.25 x 41.75 in.

Back Cover: Dream Flight, 2016 acrylic on canvas 47.5 x 48.5 in.

IGOR MELNIKOV

Dreams of Decay: The “Junkyard” Philosophy of Igor Melnikov Igor Melnikov’s art defies easy classification. The Russian-born artist resists labels like Figure Painter or Symbolist, insisting that his depictions of physical objects serve as realistic presentations of ideas, rather than coded iconography. His subdued paintings, with their detailed depictions of people and things, are not the work of a stereotypical contemporary Conceptual artist either.

Instead, Melnikov places himself in a more ambiguous territory: somewhere between traditional and conceptual, paying homage to both the technical mastery of Old Masters and the psychological subjectivity of more modern artists.

Melnikov’s duality as a traditional and conceptual artist gains clarity when examined against the restrictive backdrop of his upbringing in the Soviet Union. Born in Moscow in 1956, Melnikov’s early sense of the global art world was limited to black-and-white reproductions of great artworks, as the Communist party heavily censored the flow of international art. At 15, he enrolled at the Moscow Art Performance School. Even at an arts school, though, the global art world remained remote, as Melnikov learned a technique-centric, traditional Russian artistic style. By the time Melnikov and his fellow young Russian artists had conceived of seemingly novel ideas, they often found that their same tactics had already been employed elsewhere. They feared accidental plagiarism, so they looked for inspiration in unlikely places: as Melnikov put it, “junkyards were the Disneylands of our childhood.”

In 1975, Melnikov was conscripted into the Russian army, an experience he describes as “excruciating and burdensome.” While serving, he managed to maintain his artistic practice by sketching on scraps of paper -- a return, of sorts, to the “junkyards” of his childhood as he catalogued the realities of military life. After his service, Melnikov continued to refine his artistic practice at the Moscow Academy of Graphic Design, eventually finding steady work as an illustrator and filmmaker. In 1993, he moved to Prague, in search of a “different life,” as he said. From his first exhibition in Prague, Melnikov’s unique artistic sensibility and resolutely pure art-making approach stayed constant, even as his artworld fame spread.

Melnikov codified his creative process in the so-called “Reconstructionist” philosophy that he developed, which insisted that the value of art results from the viewer’s “context of perception.”

Like the scraps of paper and heaps of memory he worked with out of necessity in his early days as

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an artist, his art continues to highlight the beauty of the somber and the spare, the nostalgic and the pure. This prioritization of the subjectivity of the artistic experience can be seen in Melnikov’s dreamy, otherworldly paintings of children: staring calmly out of their frames, these paintings capture, by turn, the purity and strangeness of childhood. In Broken Toys, a young boy sits quietly, carefully contemplating the fate of his toys; in Boy Thinking, another little boy gazes placidly towards the viewer, drawing the onlooker into his meditative mindset. However much they might resemble portraits, Melnikov’s works are less about faithful physical representation than they are about the invocation of some deeper, more fundamental truth. The children themselves are, in a way, incidental: Melnikov says that his true subjects are “outside of time and space,” invoking the dreamy purity of childhood. The resolute concentration of the subject in Lost Chick articulates the focused vulnerability of the child, emphasizing his purity and concern. Works like Dream Flight highlight Melnikov’s interest in the otherworldly or the subconscious, as his subject, another young boy, floats peacefully in an illogical physical realm.

More than anything, the children in Melnikov’s paintings inhabit a world unto themselves. They’re granted a private and magical setting for their quiet meditations and their personal dramas. Like the black-and-white reproductions of Melnikov’s own childhood, their existences, while spare and limited, are true to the purity of childhood in a different way. Melnikov’s censored artistic upbringing ultimately manifested itself in the monastic subjectivity of his paintings; in his insistence on a pure, direct relation between viewer and viewed. Melnikov now lives and works in New Mexico, but his paintings retain the creative subjectivity and otherworldly conceptualism of his early formative artistic years.

- Annie Kiyonaga Art Historian

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“I am trying to convey the emotion in my painting, by all the means accessible to me. I paint children because they are like empty vessels that portray pure emotion. I want people to feel their connection to the rest of humanity by looking at my work” - Igor Melnikov

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BROKEN TOYS

2012

OIL ON PANEL

30 X 62.5 IN.

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OVER THE RIVER

1999

ACRYLIC ON PANEL

31.5 X 32.5 IN.

need hi res

LOST CHICK

2004

OIL ON CANVAS

24 X 24.5 IN.

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THE WINDOW

2011

OIL ON PANEL

17 X 16 IN.

FLORA III

2015

OIL ON PANEL

25.5 X 28 IN.

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10

BOY

1995

ACRYLIC ON PANEL

27.5 X 22.5 IN.

DREAM FLIGHT

2016

ACRYLIC ON PANEL

47.5 X 48.5 IN.

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OUTPOST

2016

ACRYLIC ON PANEL

39.25 X 41.75 IN.

GIRL WITH NOTE

2017

OIL ON PANEL

36 X 28.75 IN.

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BOY THINKING

2017

OIL ON PANEL

32 X 34 IN.

SCATTERED BEADS

2003

OIL ON CANVAS

32.63 X 29.88 IN.

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BOY DREAMING

2017

OIL ON PANEL

37 X 47.5 IN.

igor melnikov I am interested in a certain aspect that appears for one moment and will never come back in the same way again. It may only be an impression, or even something that I imagined. I deal mostly with feelings. I don’t paint portraits, even if sometimes I paint pictures of individual children. The most important thing to me is to catch the uncatchable expression on the face.”

Igor Melnikov grew up in a remote part of Russia. From a young age, he was passionate about art. He consumed black and white art books, especially loving the paintings of Vermeer, Wyeth, and Rembrandt. It was the fragility of nature and the essence/description of light that struck Melnikov. Later, when Melnikov was free to travel to see such masterworks in person, he realized that they were completely different than he had imagined, from the black and white reproductions. He then realized that the viewer creates half of the painting in his own mind, and from his own experience base.

Melnikov tries to create this platform for viewers of his works. He paints the child--a pure vessel of humanity, or the landscape, in a neutral state, leaving the viewer to “create” his own experience and interpretation of the painting. Igor Melnikov’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums throughout the world, and books have been published about his work.

Selected Public Collections and Exhibitions Arnot Museum of Art, Elmira, New York Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Evansville, Texas Grace Museum, Abilene, Texas New Mexico Art in Public Places, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico Robert Kirkland Museum, Union CIty, Tennessee Russian Cultural Museum, Czech Republic

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