Moscow Museum of Modern Art opens Olga Tobreluts. The New Mythology, an exhibition on view Date: January 24 – February 24 2013 .
Olga Tobreluts
Olga Tobreluts is one of the first contemporary artists who picked modern computer technologies as a medium. The latter enabled Tobreluts to develop her own singular yet extremely recognizable style one can clearly tell even in her early works. Tobreluts’s artworks appear to be intricate manipulations, in which historical realities and myths of modern culture are melted together for the purpose of transforming them into a magical super reality.
Her abstract paintings shown at an exhibition of New Artists in Museum Palace Bridge, Leningrad, USSR, in 1989, became a starting point in her career. Having moved to Moscow, she joined Petlyura’s squatters in Petrovsky Boulevard to continue working on her abstract paintings and graffiti. In the 1990s she would frequently visit the Institute ART+COM in Berlin, Germany, where she made herself acquainted with computer graphics under the supervision of Professor Ulrich Walberg. Consequently, Tobreluts executed a U-turn as to her artistic style. She quit painting altogether to focus on computer graphics combined with photography and 3D models. Tobreluts’ artistic approach evokes the ideas of Neo-Academism followers when she strives for achieving a realistic resemblance between the 3D image of a human body created with the aid of the computer and that represented in the form of an academic drawing. Since 1994 she has been a member of the New Academy of Fine Arts, a community of artists formed in December of 1989. The Academy evolved into one of the most noticeable phenomena of the Russian contemporary art. After winning a position of professor with the Department of New Technologies at the Academy, Olga Tobreluts turned into a “driving belt” of the artists’ movement mentioned above. Bruce Sterling called her “Helen of Troy equipped with a video camera and a computer.” A number of significant works, the embodiment of the spirit of that artistic movement, were created by Olga Tobreluts. The artist is building a brand-new reality that is meant to cross the boundaries of a historical context. In the meantime, the distance between the reality and “our” day is growing much shorter. Whether her ornamental myths are related to classical mythology or there is no relation whatsoever, they always speak of modern times. In fact, the Tobreluts artworks’ subjects serve as an artistic trick devised to effectively decipher a work of art for today’s viewer. The aesthetic choice of a form varies as it stems from re-actualization of mythological figures held dear for the history of Western culture.
Curated by: Antonio Geusa
The MMOMA retrospective exhibition will show Olga Tobreluts’ well-known series of works made available courtesy of several museum and private collections. Apart from the above, the artist’s experimental works will be put on display for the first time. – www.mmoma.ru