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The Gertsev Gallery on Karetny Ryad is showing two series of prints by the English "brit-artist" Gary Hume. He is celebrated as the cream of the crop and, as one critic so elegantly put it, "a flower growing in the dung." Hume has represented Britain at the Sao Paolo Biennale, has shown his work internationally, and is known to be almost reclusive in shunning the individual attentions of buyers and directing them just to his agent. He hasn't been to Russia as far as I know, but he should, as he would certainly get a warm welcome at the above gallery. More importantly, I daresay he could make much of the human subject matter here. Just look at his current selection of screen prints - portraits and angels, the portraits playing on both British iconographic celebrities and characters as well as people off the street. There is certainly much to choose from in that line in Moscow.
There is more than a touch of pop art here - screen prints were a favorite of Warhol - and it is this quality that marks these out from Russian contemporaries, as shown by the contrast between these and the other artists of the gallery. The portraits are said to be taking the ordinary and everyday in some cases and making them beautiful in spite of themselves - a difficult job with Francis Bacon, though, with his notoriously potato-shaped face. The beauty is a difficult thing to pin down as it could be taken to mean the faces themselves or the design of the print - choice of colors, layout, etc., and their quality of being a print, i.e. the flatness of the colors. Taken on a purely decorative level, it also illustrates a different set of tastes, the vaguely western current preference for minimalism - a limited set of flat colors compared to the crop of Georgians the gallery has, who seem to favour bright areas of paint smudged or streaked across the canvas to the almost opart quality of the Latvian Ieva Iltnere.
The gallery itself is a long one-roomed space with large low windows looking out onto the street. They avoid crowding the pictures together, and with the wooden floor it all has the feel of something you would find in Cork Street. The entrance hall has a small computer-displayed loop of Hume's other paintings; there is also a library. As for Hume, you are either for or against him.
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