Gretsky Dmitry / Katz Eugenia

“Terracotta Worriers” – 14 large-scale painting shows the spectator how important it is for the Teacher to be aware of his responsibility for future generations. This is an artistic performance, and as such, it communicates our thoughts about the sense of proportion, as well as a sensible compromise between individual and society. This project represents the quest for a visual interpretation of the individual freedom and sense of duty. We are using the classic technique of painting in this series, but never used brushes. Creation of a smooth surface for each image, through the special artistic method where the edge of the palm of the hand is used to even the surface of the painting allow me to reach a specially deep graduation of tonalities. The monumental painting portraits may be formally categorized in the genre of photorealism, as, for instance, portraits of the artists’ students in the series Terracotta worriers. Looking at the giant paintings one may remember the travels of Gulliver to Lilliputians and giants imagined by Swift. The idea that there is another world where everything has other dimensions, the correlation between scales in the human’s mind: the project appeals to the deep layers of our conscience. The play of words — the worrying person and the warrior, the soldier — is associated with the famous Chinese terracotta army and the kid’s mind which has been gradually modeling as from the clay material and finally takes its complete image. Gallery of Portraits - Youngsters unveil a powerful projection of images that everyone carries inside. Through manifold enlargement of Forms, you try to create significantly realistic and truthful images of your models on canvas. This pojection remains real as long as the viewer recognizes in it his or her own reflection, and as long both mutual trust and mutual interest between the viewer and these youngsters last, and as long as they stay similar, but not equal to their audience. These images exist in direct proportion to the amount of personal experience and knowledge that the viewer is inclined to bring into play, as if they tend to approach an ideal personality created by one’s own imagination. Then suddenly they outgrow the audience and become completely independent. Their eyes are glancing straight in front of them and the viewer is kept outside of their visual field. This mirrored up space of their glances creates a mysterious illusion of a seemingly endless perspective. Time passes, and Forms change, but the need to find one’s own way and draw up one’s own circle remains unchanged. And History repeats itself... Following Yuri Lotman’s quote, Time, as far as any portrait is concerned, is dynamic; its present is always full of reminiscences about the past and of anticipations of the future. A portrait is constantly balancing on the verge of artistic double-vision and a mystical reflection of reality.

The Terracotta worriers series entered the Long List of the Prize to Kandinsky and was for the first time at the exhibition of the Award Nominees in 2010. In 2012, the works from the series received the first prize for their participation in the Kress project, in the Art Museum of Georgia, USA.

Dmitry Gretsky

 Narcissus is an ongoing project that emerged from the idea of “self design” through self censorship. When talking about our identity, it is possible to assume that it can be easily rewritten, therefore we become more skeptical about an objective assessment of 

“ourselves” and in what form we may exist. Do we truly exist or it is just “an idea of ourselves” that exists?

 With this work Gretzky and Katz want to predict the future of the social media effect on oneself and create new myths around their identity through modern self-design tools such as social media. In the contemporary world our identity can be easily altered and manipulated. Through the use of a representational language of images, artists are trying to rewrite his personality for the public and, therefore, reinvent the sensation of the myth about Narcissus.

 Myth is a broad term. Myth – a word, a story, - is derived from ancient Greek. Initially, it was understood by the absolute totality of (sacred) values and philosophical truths confronting daily-empirical (profane) truths expressed by ordinary 'word'. Classical myth and modern myth can be two very contrasting things, but they have a similar principal, they are. However, myth provides us with something very human, and we continually seek answers from it. The classic version of the myth about Narcissus by Ovid is one of the examples of it.

In the new project House for Sale, Dmitry Gretsky and Evgeniya Kats act like truly contemporary artists — they are ready to expose their life to the spectator without any embarrassment over its deviations and existential problems. Oversized graphic sheets are devoted to the strange plights and puzzling situations of one couple in the confined space of a house. 

The nude body in these works cannot be confused with any other — it is a contemporary body that exists outside the classical laws of beauty, with reflexes conditioned by the repressive experience of the 20th century, and deprived of social masks. The contemporary body first appears in Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. One realistically showed male and female figures in all their unsightly details, while the other showed cinematic expression in depicting the impetuous movement of a character inside a cube drawn on a plane. But in the search for the closest resemblances to these drawings, we should mention two very different Americans who are classics of figurative painting: Philip Pearlstein and Eric Fischl. As in Pearlstein's paintings, executed in a dry graphical manner, the works of Gretsky and Katz depict the semi-nudist existence of characters who have no one to be shy of. 

The artistic couple from St. Petersburg live and work in Toronto. They belong to a small group of artists who have managed not only to merge academic training with current topics and narratives, but also to prove that an academic painter is able to think like a contemporary artist. By moving to Canada and changing their artistic environment, they broke off their relationship with the Russian tradition of representation that was front and center in their previous works. While Gretsky and Katz used to compulsively demonstrate the entire range of their abilities with the practiced skill of professional painters, a flexible self-restraint in their new surroundings has benefited this new series of works. 

The drawings in the House for Sale series have a completely different intonation — now the artists are documenting, not painting. Black and white graphics are much more precise when depicting complex and strong emotional states. They don't have the excessive drama of the pictorial interiors from the previous works in the Living Space cycle. The artists, using just a paper sheet and taking nothing from the past but the large format, leave the viewer face to face with the graphic material. The nude figures in the works are nearly life size — we are presented with a monumental format. At the same time, it is the nude pose so familiar from years of studying at the Academy of Arts, when the student is obliged to demonstrate mastery of the craft. It is obvious that the compositions are based on photos taken by the artists, but their choice of monochrome drawing as the media reduces the expressive techniques. 

The drawing technique is well suited to the context: it seems to manifest the monotony with which the artist shades the sheet of paper. The pencil strokes overflow the surface of the graphic sheet, transforming a technique into the meaning and content of the work. The artists make the dejection and boredom of their characters tangible. It is ever present in all their exhausting occupations, whether on the exercise bike, in the bathroom, in the corridor, in the bedroom, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the boiler room, in the attic or even in the artist's studio... Gretsky and Katz have included every spot. 

Edward Hopper, once a great American artist and proponent of solitude, poeticized deserted interiors flooded with artificial or natural light in his paintings. The house in the House for Sale series is not yet fully lived-in — in one of the works, a naked man is standing on a chair, installing a light fixture. The authors are ready to share with the viewer the joy of acquiring a home and its association with obtaining upper-middle-class status, but at the same time they pull frightening shadows out of the corners of the rooms using just a single pencil lead. The viewer may inadvertently become a participant in the horror that is unfolding in the typical scenery of suburbia. The house is for sale, but the deal doesn't include all its shadows, and there is no way out of the house for them.

Pavel Gerasimenko