VLADEY together with the OVCHARENKO gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Leonida Tskhe. On the eve of their departure for St Petersburg, art historian and curator Andrey Shabanov visited the artist in his Offenbach studio.
The heat is oppressive; a “male voice paints an apocalyptic scene”, while “a large experimental collective embarks on a journey through slow gothic country, beguiling chamber music, wild rock storms, vocal samples and field recordings.” The Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has become a new passion for Leonid Tskhe (a long-time fan of Swans) and provided the emotional backdrop for his new works. There is something mesmerising in this parallel expansion of the artist’s musical and visual universes, which nevertheless continue to coincide in their key qualities: viscosity, fluidity of form, complexity and muteness, atmosphere and unease, ambiguity of planes, as well as mythological and epic intensity in a confined space.
Your strongest impressions of this year? “Hm, probably not that many. The first thing that comes to mind is Florentina Holzinger’s performance Sancta, to which you actually invited us, together with Sergey Bratkov, in Berlin. I’d never seen anything like it. Fresh, shocking, a borderline experience. Then the Old Masters, who never fail to surprise me when they cross my path. And, perhaps, Werner Tübke’s panorama (Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany in Bad Frankenhausen — A.Sh.). Though it struck me more with its grandiose madness.”
The artist’s spacious, almost enfilade-like studio lies five minutes on foot from the railway station. From the studio’s vast windows, however, one sees only a noisy street and a nondescript high-rise that blocks the horizon. It was less than two years before this prosaic irritation found its way into one of his works (Das Fenster). A sequence of massive, unusually naturalistic windows ostentatiously fills the upper part of the canvas, from which a façade putto steps down into the intimate den of the studio. It is edging towards night; the guest’s intentions remain unclear… One senses the artist beginning to feel constrained, both by this city and by the subjects and techniques he has already mastered.
“Yes, the selection of works for the show represents my crossroads at the moment. I rewound, unsettled, and even undermined some of my earlier approaches — stepped back a little, trying to understand what I was doing in this or that cycle, or even earlier in St Petersburg. I wanted to shake myself up, my practice, my memories — and decide what comes next.”
This creative crossroads has ultimately resulted in eight monumental canvases. As in a Russian fairy tale: if one goes to the left, one finds a horse (The Rider); to the right, one encounters the Old Masters (Cocoon, Gravity); straight ahead, one rediscovers himself (see the artist’s self-portrait against the backdrop of the Alpine mountains: München). Yet there are also intriguing attempts to break free of this closed circle of familiar motifs and techniques.
The most significant, in the context of Tskhe’s practice, is his abandonment of the customary white ground in favour of red. Three such experiments appear in the show, including the aforementioned Das Fenster. “Surely, it’s easier for me to paint when I rely on graphic devices; with minimal means, in a single layer, you achieve results.” On a white canvas, the composition was formed through drawing or outlines. On a red ground, however, it is colour, silhouettes of patches, a collaged effect that begins to dictate the composition, pushing Tskhe towards a new, for him, layered painting with underpainting, detailing and glazes. “Once you get involved with oil layering, it really draws you in. The work takes much longer, moving through many technological stages. Because of this, several episodes of life can be accumulated within a single painting.” This new artistic challenge has opened up new expressive possibilities. Compared with the flatter Gravity, painted in the usual manner on a white ground, the red Cocoon has acquired far greater painterly depth and materiality of volume.
Both works, nevertheless, continue to address the already familiar task of constructing a “universal, androgynous identity” and thereby subverting conventional academic notions of normativity. This problem — with a partly mannerist character — first emerged in Tskhe’s series The Risk-Taker (2023) and reached its apogee in The Embrace (2024). Small wonder that after such prolonged immersion in a confined, energetically charged and bodily space, so characteristic of these series, came the desire either to “blow it up” from within (The Screw) or to step outside into the open air. In other words, to attempt landscape.
Thus, Executioner’s Cottage was based not only on a red ground but also on a motif noticed in a medieval castle in Salzburg. Yet in Offenbach I caught only its first, prosaically sentimental state: light from the horizon gently illuminated a place with an awkward history long past. Already in St Petersburg, under the pressure of local gravitational forces and circumstances, the pastoral Cottage deformed into something apocalyptic. A solitary figure (the artist’s daughter Marusya?) plays with a cannon in a warped, distorted space, beneath a torn grey sky hung on metal hooks like a skin or a stage backdrop.
Against this background, The Storm may at first seem to render a world in harmony and equilibrium. Like The Screw, it was painted in St Petersburg, inspired by walks along the gulf, and it carries a similar metallic tang. Perhaps these nuances suggest that here everything is rather as in Antonioni’s well-known film. To rephrase its annotation slightly: one day, in a coastal park, a celebrated artist paints a seascape; later, on closer inspection, he notices that there is a shipwreck behind the idyllic image.
Andrey Shabanov
VLADEY together with the OVCHARENKO gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Leonida Tskhe. On the eve of their departure for St Petersburg, art historian and curator Andrey Shabanov visited the artist in his Offenbach studio.
The heat is oppressive; a “male voice paints an apocalyptic scene”, while “a large experimental collective embarks on a journey through slow gothic country, beguiling chamber music, wild rock storms, vocal samples and field recordings.” The Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has become a new passion for Leonid Tskhe (a long-time fan of Swans) and provided the emotional backdrop for his new works. There is something mesmerising in this parallel expansion of the artist’s musical and visual universes, which nevertheless continue to coincide in their key qualities: viscosity, fluidity of form, complexity and muteness, atmosphere and unease, ambiguity of planes, as well as mythological and epic intensity in a confined space.
Your strongest impressions of this year? “Hm, probably not that many. The first thing that comes to mind is Florentina Holzinger’s performance Sancta, to which you actually invited us, together with Sergey Bratkov, in Berlin. I’d never seen anything like it. Fresh, shocking, a borderline experience. Then the Old Masters, who never fail to surprise me when they cross my path. And, perhaps, Werner Tübke’s panorama (Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany in Bad Frankenhausen — A.Sh.). Though it struck me more with its grandiose madness.”
The artist’s spacious, almost enfilade-like studio lies five minutes on foot from the railway station. From the studio’s vast windows, however, one sees only a noisy street and a nondescript high-rise that blocks the horizon. It was less than two years before this prosaic irritation found its way into one of his works (Das Fenster). A sequence of massive, unusually naturalistic windows ostentatiously fills the upper part of the canvas, from which a façade putto steps down into the intimate den of the studio. It is edging towards night; the guest’s intentions remain unclear… One senses the artist beginning to feel constrained, both by this city and by the subjects and techniques he has already mastered.
“Yes, the selection of works for the show represents my crossroads at the moment. I rewound, unsettled, and even undermined some of my earlier approaches — stepped back a little, trying to understand what I was doing in this or that cycle, or even earlier in St Petersburg. I wanted to shake myself up, my practice, my memories — and decide what comes next.”
This creative crossroads has ultimately resulted in eight monumental canvases. As in a Russian fairy tale: if one goes to the left, one finds a horse (The Rider); to the right, one encounters the Old Masters (Cocoon, Gravity); straight ahead, one rediscovers himself (see the artist’s self-portrait against the backdrop of the Alpine mountains: München). Yet there are also intriguing attempts to break free of this closed circle of familiar motifs and techniques.
The most significant, in the context of Tskhe’s practice, is his abandonment of the customary white ground in favour of red. Three such experiments appear in the show, including the aforementioned Das Fenster. “Surely, it’s easier for me to paint when I rely on graphic devices; with minimal means, in a single layer, you achieve results.” On a white canvas, the composition was formed through drawing or outlines. On a red ground, however, it is colour, silhouettes of patches, a collaged effect that begins to dictate the composition, pushing Tskhe towards a new, for him, layered painting with underpainting, detailing and glazes. “Once you get involved with oil layering, it really draws you in. The work takes much longer, moving through many technological stages. Because of this, several episodes of life can be accumulated within a single painting.” This new artistic challenge has opened up new expressive possibilities. Compared with the flatter Gravity, painted in the usual manner on a white ground, the red Cocoon has acquired far greater painterly depth and materiality of volume.
Both works, nevertheless, continue to address the already familiar task of constructing a “universal, androgynous identity” and thereby subverting conventional academic notions of normativity. This problem — with a partly mannerist character — first emerged in Tskhe’s series The Risk-Taker (2023) and reached its apogee in The Embrace (2024). Small wonder that after such prolonged immersion in a confined, energetically charged and bodily space, so characteristic of these series, came the desire either to “blow it up” from within (The Screw) or to step outside into the open air. In other words, to attempt landscape.
Thus, Executioner’s Cottage was based not only on a red ground but also on a motif noticed in a medieval castle in Salzburg. Yet in Offenbach I caught only its first, prosaically sentimental state: light from the horizon gently illuminated a place with an awkward history long past. Already in St Petersburg, under the pressure of local gravitational forces and circumstances, the pastoral Cottage deformed into something apocalyptic. A solitary figure (the artist’s daughter Marusya?) plays with a cannon in a warped, distorted space, beneath a torn grey sky hung on metal hooks like a skin or a stage backdrop.
Against this background, The Storm may at first seem to render a world in harmony and equilibrium. Like The Screw, it was painted in St Petersburg, inspired by walks along the gulf, and it carries a similar metallic tang. Perhaps these nuances suggest that here everything is rather as in Antonioni’s well-known film. To rephrase its annotation slightly: one day, in a coastal park, a celebrated artist paints a seascape; later, on closer inspection, he notices that there is a shipwreck behind the idyllic image.
Andrey Shabanov
