Rustam Khalfin. Self-portrait without a mirror

Kasteev Museum of Arts together with the contemporary art gallery "Tengri-Umai" presented the ONLINE exhibition "Rustam Khalfin. Self-portrait without a mirror".

The exhibition presents various stages of Khalfin's creative biography from the 1980s to 2008. Most of the works were provided by Tengri-Umai Gallery, which actively collaborated with the artist in the last years of his life.

The exhibition opens with works of the "Sterligov period", created under the influence of one of the last representatives of the Russian avant–garde - Vladimir Sterligov, whose acquaintance in 1971 made a huge impression on Khalfin. Sterligov, a student of Malevich, developed his own system in painting – a cup-dome, which is based on a method of organizing the space of the canvas through a curve connecting the "living touch of two worlds". Here the boundary between color and background, abstraction and figurativeness is erased. Painting created under the influence of the cup-dome system is a pure experiment, where the landscape space is transformed into a field for observing the object–environment, space and color. Here, the top and bottom tend to swap places, objects lose their density, gaining weightlessness. Khalfin appears here as a serious, subtle painter, who does not simply follow the beaten path – he develops the ideas of Malevich and Sterligov.

Research work in painting prompted Khalfin to comprehend the outstanding achievements in painting of previous eras – in his works there are references to the works of Matisse, Cézanne, Malevich, Velázquez. Two replicas of Velázquez's "Las Meninas" represent a recognizable plot transformed by the curvilinear constructions of the cup-dome system – a pure spatial experiment in painting. Regardless of the choice of material, the unity of opposites can be traced in Khalfin's works: form-antiform, whole-fragment, visible-felt, internal-external, emptiness-fullness.

The exhibition presents several installations of the Artist's Skin project (1997) – a series of artifacts created by Khalfin and his associates from different materials – this is what "sheds every year", symbolizing the vulnerability of the artist. The author's interpretations of paintings using non-artistic materials generate original visual statements. No less interesting are the planar "flowing" silhouettes on the white background of the wall – the objectified bodily voids of the human figure, also, a kind of self-portraits of Rustam Khalfin. The author comprehended the haptic tactility of nomadic culture in this way – felting felt, modeling kurt, clay. He coined the term "pulota" – a paradoxical combination of emptiness and fullness inside a clenched palm, a plastic object of tactile space, from which the development of the surrounding world and the landscapes of one's own body begins. The pulotas in the exhibition appear both in pictorial embodiment, and in the form of plaster casts, and in the form of planar objects on the wall – pure forms of the mature period of Khalfin's creativity. One of them is named "In honor of Lida" and is an enlarged quote of the mini–sculpture of Lida Blinova, the wife and alter ego of the artist, who played a huge role in the creative formation of Khalfin (he survived her by 12 years).

Several works are combined in the series "Self–Portrait without a mirror" (1993) - a fragmentary human figure, where the outline of the lines denotes the bend of the arm or hip, "the eye of the eye", with the dissolving forms of the universe around. The desire to comprehend the hidden essence of things and phenomena, intuitive knowledge of the laws of being, the search for a pictorial model of the universe, of which the artist himself is a part.

You can view the works and photos of the exhibition on our website by following the link.