Pyotr Belenok - Important Contemporary Russian Art–Property from a Foundation London Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Livet Reichard Company, Inc., New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Phyllis Kind Gallery

  • Catalogue Essay

    Works by Pyotr Belenok consist of fragments of reality that are usually cut out from magazines and other illustrated publications and live in their own phantasmogoric surroundings. Using the means of collage, Belenok builds a surreal world of science fiction from real, figurative elements, ultimately layering one real world onto another, which is imagined. In this new, fantastic world, man loses or finds himself at mercy of the alien, cosmic forces. Being a fully-fledged member of the Moscow underground art movement from 1967 onwards, Belenok and his works stand out from the rest and formulate their own artistic language, which Belenok named as ‘panic realism'.
    The work Big Moon corresponds to the state of ‘panic realism'. The deserted landscape, a running man under an omnipresent Moon creates a feeling of alienation and helplessness in the face of the unknown, but powerful force – an emotional state that Belenok experienced himself, when the village, where he grew up, was evacuated due to its close proximity to Chernobyl. Isolation in the face of the unreal and fantastic power – is a theme of the painter's interest: "I am not interested in the minute observation of life: I observe the world and its problems from a detached position in space". (Pyotr Belenok, taken from Stretching the Limits in Beyond Memory. Soviet Non¬Conformist Photography and Photo related Works of Art, by Neumaier, D. (ed), Rutgers University Press, 2004, p. 159)
    The dynamic movement of the person in the collage adds to the emotional expressiveness of the work.
    Elena Evstafieva

29

Big Moon

1985
Fabric and acrylic on canvas.
144.7 x 116.3 cm. (57 x 45 3/4 in).
Signed and dated ‘Belenok 85 [in Cyrillic]’ lower right.

Estimate
£8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for £38,900

Important Contemporary Russian Art–Property from a Foundation

28 Feb 2008, 6pm
London