In a show currently taking place in Ashgabat, two leading local artists, the “realist” Aleksandr Kashirsky and the “surrealist” Ljudmila Nabirkina, offer a provocative example of how culture can engage people with reality, providing new tools to understand it.
Ashgabat () – Art lovers and critics are particularly impressed by the exhibition currently taking place in the hall of the Union of Turkmen Artists in Ashgabat, where you can observe the multifaceted dynamism of creativity in one country often crystallized in its forms and its symbols. The exhibition offers a very stimulating “duo” of two important and very different Turkmen artists: the “realist” Aleksandr Kashirsky and the “surrealist” Ljudmila Nabirkina.
Initially, Kashirsky only planned to exhibit his “Representations of the greats of Turkmen and Western culture in bronze and wood bas-reliefs”, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, but in the process of putting together the exhibition, several canvases that reproduce moments and places were also included. of everyday life, with the old streets of Ashgabat, courtyards and fountains, where men and animals coexist in peace and friendship. The paintings aroused nostalgic emotions in the inhabitants of the capital with the memory of “our beloved and comfortable Ashgabat” of former times.
Kashirsky began his artistic metalwork in the 1970s as a corporate and office decorator, and later went on to independently produce dozens of “medal art” portraits featuring famous people from both the East and West. You can admire the lively features of Bach, Chopin and Paganini, the Turkmen composer Veli Mukhatov and the “Turkmen nightingale”, the singer Maja Šakhberdjeva, among many others. The author is particularly proud of the portraits of the great writer Kajum Tangrjkuliev and the well-known journalist and photographer Alikper Gusejnov.
At Aleksandr’s initiative, Nabirkina was also invited to participate, after a long process to convince her. The latter’s works had attracted the attention of critics in the late eighties and early nineties for their originality, difficult to limit to a single stylistic definition. Ljudmila is able to go from very realistic images and portraits to others that are surprising due to her enigmatic nature. Very essential and laconic faces but loaded with symbolic images, with very thick and raised strokes of various colors. They are works that often make you think or trigger the imagination, such as “Charlie Chaplin” from 1982, which looks like a child’s drawing but captures a gaze in which the entire world is reflected.
It is the same impression that “The Mirror” produces, that “when I cry, he does not laugh”, and the tragic monochrome “Pushkin”, in a sad and dramatic tone due to the premature death of the poet. Very varied, on the other hand, is the “Scene in the presence of Gogol” from 1988, which conveys the mystical feeling of the spasmodic expectation before the pagan festival of Ivan Kupala, the shortest night of the year, with all the ancient folklore of the Malorossija-Ukraine. The profile of the greatest Russian-Ukrainian writer “sails” among the clouds that precede sunset, reminding the viewer of the deep and indecipherable relationship between territories and peoples today plunged in the horror of war.
In the early 2000s, Nabirkina was engaged in “interior photos” – pictures of the flight of reality in motion, after which the artist took refuge in silence and solitude for a long time. Kashirsky precisely succeeded in gradually reincorporating her into the community of artists and the socio-cultural life of Turkmenistan, associating her with her show more than thirty years after Lyudmila’s last public exhibition. She herself wanted to baptize her section of the exhibition with the title Soprikosnovenie, “Getting in touch”, to signify both the friendship between the two artists and the mission of art: to put people in contact with reality by offering new tools for their understanding. .
