Style
Fantasy Realism
1948-2017 (Moscow, Russia)
Art of Vladimir Petrov-Gladky invariably gets sharp evaluations and comments: from admiration to indignation. Meanwhile Petrov-Gladky is on integral part of Russian culture. His painting is a strange amalgam of contradictory traits: where his contemporaries - artists of underground art - tend to a terse style and restraint, he, on the contrary, seeks a picturesque and figurative exuberance. Artist belongs to an unofficial or "other art", he is the representative of the line associated with visionary art and fantastic realism. But it's the superficial analogies, only partly helping to approach to his art.
Petrov-Gladky, as a disciple of Vasily Sitnikov (1915-1987), famous for his ”backstreet” private school, has brilliantly mastered the light and airy oil technique of his teacher: tine luminescence of corporal shapes appearing from a haze, gentle ”sfumato”, and careful work-over at the whole canvas.
Petrov-Gladky is a grateful successor of the Silver Century, and pays tribute to many of its trends eroticism, mysticism, cult of beauty, love of oddities. The artist takes surrealism as a starting point, but moves from it to refined form metamorphoses.
Metamorphosis presupposes a complete transtormotion overstepping the bounds, transition from one universe to another, change of ”form”. Vladimir Petrov-Gladky invites us to overstep the bounds of the conventional and recognizable. He manages to comprehend originally a technique of anamorphosis, already known by Leonardo do Vinci, and widely used by Salvador Dali. Having started in earlier works with combination images practice, (this method can be called assembly so characteristic for the art of 1970-1980ss,) in the works of 2000-s the artist’s come to a harmonious and tree overflowing of forms and picture elements into each other, without borders and ,,seams”. The works of this period are distinguished by open and polycentric composition, semantic richness of figurative structure, plot appearance and mastery of the ”story composition”.
Monipulotions with objectness and abstract, free transition from one figural language to another one are illustrative of postmodernism art. As well as the ,,return” of the painting itself, actualized at the turn 1970-1980’s, more clearly and distinctly reflected in Western art. But ,,return to painting” in Russian art was not less considerable and important turn which has designated the beginning of a new epoch. In unofficial art of Moscow this returning is connected with the well-known exhibition hall on Malaya Gruzinskoyo Str., and with famous group "20 Moscow artists” whose representatives have refused minimalistic means of expression, having overcome a fear of picturesque effect. In Petrov-Gladky works, like fire and ice, two opposite principles faced: kitsch collection of ordinary images and the richest pictorial culture.
Petrov-Gladky’s painting, saturated with traditions of symbolism, impressionism, art of V. Kandinsky, started out from them, and having passed through the peculiar interest of all his generation in late works of Salvador Dali, (who octually laid the foundation of postmodernism in painting), in the late 1970-s instinctively approaches to fantastic realism of ,,Vienna school”, originating in the creativity of symbolists of Secession and their successor Ernst Fuchs.
The art of Petrov-Gladky is a pictorial persistence in the most traditional sense, what is uncommon nowadays. The artist postulates inherent worth and self-sufficiency of art so reviving the cult of "beouty". Artist's consonance with the culture of the early XX century and with visionary style in the world art can be read in his attraction to the fantasy, reflection, theatricality, and in the interest in spiritual issues, particularly interpreted through a meta-history, a clash of cultural and natural elements, a symbol and Eros. The artist adherence to strictly picturesque problems is also related to the traditions of symbolism and is expressed in a special attention to the space and its interaction with the ornamental, decorative surface. Petrov-Glodky paintings are full of allegories, poetic motifs, allusions to the mythological subjects and iconographic scenes, but do not look for the fable there - it’s a false perceptual code for the beholder.
Paintings of this artist require long and careful contemplation.
Art education and training: State Art School, Vasily Sitnikov private art studio.
Member of the National Federation of Artists and International Federation of Artists UNESCO, Corresponding member of International Academy of Culture and Art.
Collections and museums: Russia, the United States, Europe, Australia, Latin America and Canada.
Participated in the exhibitions in Russia, Finland, the USA, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Germany.
Personal exhibitions: Russia, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Sweden.
