Evgeny Muzalevsky

Monochrome, with my Mother behind m

Evgeny Muzalevsky

Monochrome, with Mama Behind Me

Curators: Olga Sviblova, Alina Pinsky

On 17 September 2024 a solo exhibition by Evgeny Muzalevsky opens at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.

Evgeny Muzalevsky was born in 1995 in the village of Alexeevka in the Samara Region. He began his career in art with photography, enrolling at the Rodchenko School. In 2017 he participated in a Rodchenko School group exhibition at MAMM, ‘Direct Photography: Diary and Self-Portrait. Igor Mukhin’s Workshop’. During his studies Muzalevsky developed an interest in graphics and painting, and today these are the principal media used by the artist.

As a student Muzalevsky began keeping diaries with sketches of memories and events, as the artist himself says, “to dump images”. This is a kind of personal archive, a self-portrait diary he always carries with him.

Muzalevsky’s lively and expressive work is egocentric in the best sense. It is directly related to the artist’s life experience. Mastering the large-scale plane of the canvas in his abstract compositions, he constructs, first of all, the space of his own meanings, his personal mythology based on the events of his own dramatic biography.

In 2020 Evgeny Muzalevsky continued his studies at the School of Arts and Design in Offenbach, Germany.

The artist’s first major solo exhibition was held in 2021 at the Alina Pinsky Gallery. In recent years a new stage has appeared in Muzalevsky’s work: compared to the earlier frenetic, impulsive and rather intuitive works, his canvases and graphics become more structured. They acquire order and a manifestation of architectonics; in a sense they are reminiscent of ‘stained glass’. Muzalevsky develops his own vocabulary, a set of specific compositional elements – images that create a kind of ‘brickwork’ on the plane of the canvas by developing and interacting with each other in different ways.

The artist says: “It’s important for me to devise my own space for the picture, but it always escapes from sight. Usually this is space in a broad sense: recently – the space of caves, various miniatures, model universes, frescoes or buildings. And my changing understanding of space is influenced by new technical means, canvases, environments, by how and with what I make the picture”.

Experimenting with materials and adding pastels to oil paints, the artist achieves multiple variations of shades in one colour. The use of complex colour nuances within a monochrome palette gives rise to a new quality in Muzalevsky’s painting – luminosity.

The museum exhibition is based on monochrome works from 2022 to 2023. Muzalevsky himself writes about this period: “During a short time spent in Italy I was fascinated by cemetery glass lamps and moss covering the walls. I carried with me thoughts of mosaics and stained glass, which changed my perception of space and composition in painting and watercolours. It was then I first began working with oil pastels. <…>

In 2022 I decided to approach a black and white palette. I worked with oil pastels and scarcely touched the brushes, using dry rags to rub the image, like an archaeologist. The paintings were assembled in a collage, like structures rather than a combination of two different materials. It was difficult for me to reflect on the present, so I dug into the past, especially the 1920s to 1940s, reading about the OBERIU artists. This called to mind a sense of imprisonment and an archive. <…>

The black and white paintings of 2022 are not a series, but a separate project, where the images tip each other out of balance. In 2023 I painted large-format works in St. Petersburg, specially cutting the canvas to make it resemble a diary. I omitted some parts of the paintings and disrupted the gluing when I framed them.”

Part of the exhibition is dedicated to the result of a creative tandem between Evgeny Muzalevsky and his mother, with her image and reflections about her constantly present in the artist’s work. It all began with a kind of therapy Evgeny invented for his mother, who was held in an ‘ordinary regime’ prison colony. The amazing, poignant and skilfully executed embroideries created by the artist’s mother repeat the series of vertical canvases by her son.