Yury Trofimov
PAINTING
April 10-24, 2015

About the exhibition

In 1957 Yury Trofimov left his work as a geologist and came as a mechanic at the Alapaevsk Steel Works. He begins to write poems, falls in love with the texts by Velimir Khlebnikov and James Joyce. Trying to make sense of his poetic language, he discovers modernistic painting. In the early 1960s Yury Trofimov works hard creating portraits, still lives, abstract paintings, and Matisse, Klee, Rotko's hommages.

"We were romantics," he says about a bike ride with his friend Leonid Keith to Alexander Grin's grave in 1961. This personal romanticism is in tune with one of the epoch. However, his attempts to live in the factory town Alapaevsk, ignoring both the Soviet view of the world and customary hierarchies of the core-periphery and following some other aesthetic and ethical principles, seem to be really amazing. In painting Yuri Trofimov keeps the energy of his individual autonomy, and this energy inspires a modern spectator with vivid images of how he can live remaining true to himself.

In 1963 Yury Trofimov arranged an exhibition of his art works at the plant's gas-rescuing station. Later the article "We don't need such an "art!" appeared in a local newspaper. "Trofimov doesn't understand the problems of Soviet art at all," it was reported in the newspaper without any understanding the artist and without forgiving his boldness to pose the tasks to himself.

In 1964 Yury Trofimov went to Chukotka, after returning to Alapaevsk since 1969 he works as a photographer. He left the painting. The few works created in the beginning of 1970s and the Perestroika period weren't shown to friends, and the early works were put on the mezzanine. The causes for "farewell" to the painting were various: mother Anna I. Trofimova started to paint beautiful pictures not without the son's influence; photography has given new opportunities "to perceive the world," while painting allowed the artist only "to create a different reality." The color fields and signs (letters, numerals) of the reality "stuck together" in his abstract works. Painting was more like the instrument of self-understanding for the artist, but not the language of understanding of the reality.

The story of Yury Trofimov cannot be read as a biography of non-realized artist in the circumstances of the Soviet ideological and aesthetic control. On the contrary, it is a story of the person and the artist who found himself in reading and writing, painting and photography, friendship and love and demonstrated that neither political, nor institutional conditions irreversibly and entirely define our life.

Marina Sokolovskaya
Translated by Elvina Sharaeva