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Dmitri Plavinsky
Description
- Dmitri Plavinsky
- Church of the Annunciation in the Village near Zagorsk, 1975
signed in Cyrillic (lower right); inscribed II 2/15 (lower left)
- etching on three sheets of paper laid down on board
- 28 by 60 in.
- 71 by 152 cm
Provenance
Literature
Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton, New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and The Unknown, Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Press, 1977, exhibition catalogue, p. 105, fig. 106, illustrated
John E. Bowlt et al., Dmitri Plavinsky, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000
Condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
A dissident artist in the Soviet Union, Dmitri Plavinsky "escaped" into the prehistoric and historical past, traveling to Central Asia and northern Russia to fuel his imagination and discover his imagery. He was among the Soviet nonconformist artists who made works on religious themes that, as he explained, were meant "to represent the terrible condition of religion in the Soviet Union." His immigration to New York in 1991 added to his storehouse of subjects and genres, which range from plants to animals to shellfish to hallucinatory urbanscapes. (The artist has since returned to Moscow, where he currently lives.)
Trained at the Moscow Art College in Memory of 1905, from which he graduated in 1956, Plavinsky is as adept with oils and acrylics as he is with various printmaking techniques. In the 1960s, important collections of Western graphic arts as well as Japanese prints were accessible to the public in the Print Room of the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where Plavinsky spent much time studying the techniques and history of engraving; he even compiled a table of all known engraving strokes. By the middle of the decade, Plavinsky had completely mastered all types of etching, often combining this medium with that of linocut. For a long time, etching was Plavinsky's favorite art form.
In his numerous journeys throughout Russia, Plavinsky found motifs for his future large-scale compositions. The present etching embodies his concern with the disappearance and decay of cultural matter over time.