Tatiana Nazarenko - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Sunday, June 29, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Tatyana Nazarenko: Transition, October 15, 1998 – January 15, 1999; New York, Ewers Center for the Arts, Tatyana Nazarenko: My Russia, May 1 – May 26, 2002

  • Literature

    Yevgenia Petrova, Editor-in-Chief. Tatyana Nazarenko: Vanishing Reality. St. Petersburg: 2006, Palace Editions, p. 134 (illustrated); Alexandre Gertsman, Ed. Tatyana Nazarenko: My Russia. New York: 2002, INTART – International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art, p. 24 (illustrated);  Alexandre Gertsman, Ed. Tatyana Nazarenko: Transition. New York: 1998, INTART – International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art, p. 31 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Tatyana Nazarenko is a realist, not a Soviet-style socialist realist, nor an American
    Social realist, but rather what I want to call an absurd realist. By this I mean
    experienced firsthand the absurdity of social reality, and who recognizes its power to make human beings feel absurd. This is the inward link of her art and the Old Master
    Northern Realists as Pieter Breughel: a sense of the inherent absurdity, not to
    human existence under certain dehumanizing conditions. W. H. Auden once said that
    Masters were never wrong about suffering, and Nazarenko is never wrong about a more subtle suffering than the Old Masters ever depicted.
     
    Nazarenko grew up under the dehumanizing conditions of Soviet Russia, and her figures have the depleted, reserved look- the drab look of obedience and self suppression - everyday Russians had to wear to survive under that authoritarian regime. It is not exactly a look of life - not exactly the look of people blossoming with vitality - not exactly a fresh, happy look. Such an appearance is not just a necessity of social survival under totalitarianism; figures mean as little to themselves as they do to the authoritarian society they live in: they are inwardly as well as outwardly inconspicuous. In a society in which life is cheap, to live is to die inwardly, slowly but surely. The physiognomies of Nazarenko's figures express living death - deprivation and frustration carried to an extreme, so that gratification has become meaningless, and all that is left is the unconscious feeling of the pointlessness of living. Nazarenko's figures have internalized the Soviet regime's suspicion of its citizens, so that they have become suspicious of themselves”. Donald Kuspit

421

On the Street

1989
Oil on canvas.
150.2 x 119.7 cm. (59 1/8 x 47 1/8 in).
Signed and dated 'T.Nazarenko 1989 [in Cyrillic]' lower right; signed, titled and dated 'Nazarenko T.G. "On the Street 1989 [in Cyrillic]' on the reverse.   

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art Day Sale

30 June 2008, 10am & 2pm
London