Leonid Tishkov: 2009/03

19.3.09

Star

Star, 2003. Metal, glass, electic lamps, 1,5 m x 1,5 m.
On exhibiton "Leonid Tishkov: Apokrifos" at National Center for Contempory Art, Moscow

Visit of the Star

Unannounced, a single star appeared to us, shining alone, cut off from her fellows;
Like an eagle beating the air with its wings,

That’s how the star’s rays moved around it.

When you hear about the star, don’t think that it was one of the ones visible to our eyes;

No, this one was a divine, angelic power, appearing to us in the form of a star.

Can a person, just one of the meek of the earth,

Really touch it without feeling any anxiety?

Your body and soul consist of a starry substance;

If we accept a star into our lives, then our own light starts to burn even brighter,

Uniting with the eternal Light of the Morning Star.

The disintegrated world, sunk in shadow, is gathered back together and made whole by the Light,

The House that was destroyed, once upon a time, on Earth, will be rebuilt as a new, heavenly Home.

Leonid Tishkov

16.3.09

Video work "Farewell to the Christmas Tree" at CU Art Museum, Colorado

15.3.09

The figure of a deep sea diver has emerged in Leonid Tishkov's work as early as late 1970s, when he was actively working in the field of caricature. Deep sea divers, along with aviators, seamen and representatives of other, typically modern professions, had become heroes of the Soviet pop culture since 1920s. By the 1970s, when the romantic halo around these supermen of the sea bed whiffed away, they gradually evolved into absurd and comical characters. In 1980s the deep sea divers appear in Tishkov's artwork ever more often, while their nature undergoes appreciable changes. They turn from caricature and parody characters into mythological creatures. Their world becomes ever more involved, developing its own cosmogony and history. It grows from within itself numerous contradictory stories, where layers of the Soviet adult culture or children's folklore are mixed with rudiments of classical Russian archaic stories and a science fiction of explicitly surrealist kind. The works shown at the exhibition belong to the big Deep Sea Divers cycle created in 1996-2000.