Georgy Litichevsky gives us a tour to his exhibition “Hypothetical Dances”

Greek version here

[dropcap size=big]D[/dropcap]uring an interesting tour that took place on 12/11/2016 in the State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece), Georgy Litichevsky presented to the audience his wonderful creatures in “Hypothetical Dances”.

Georgy Litichevsky, born in Ukraine in 1956, is one of the most important representatives of comics in contemporary Russian art. Self-taught and artistically concerned, he started painting his first comics on paper in a young age. As a student of Archaeology and History in Lomonosov University of Moscow, he got in touch with artists and intellectual people who encouraged him to go into the art of comics.

[dropcap size=big]C[/dropcap]ontroversial and eccentric, animated and playful, innovative and ingenious, revealing and sarcastic, his creations are characterized by bright colours and flat surfaces. The quick gestural writing inherent to the aesthetics of comics is grafted with human situations and behaviors, with references to ideological and existential issues, indicating the deep humanism of the author.

Being well-traveled, the visitor can detect European cities, which the artist has visited and captures in his creations. The exhibition “Hypothetical Dances” includes a series of large wall-works in cloth, comics on paper and smaller compositions, older as well as new ones. At the beginning of the exhibition, there is a video projection which shows the process of creation of certain works, with the artist either inside the studio or wandering in the streets of Moscow. “The creations are in a constant game of speech and picture trying to describe imaginary and real stories through surreal and bizarre scenes”, Mrs. Irene Papakonstantinou, curator and art historian at SMCA, mentioned at the start of the tour.

[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]hen, the artist emphasized that dance is a means of communication. For this reason, the heroes of his works, imaginary or real, are engaged in a continuous dance game. Through his works, the artist is trying to express indirectly the modern ideological hysteria, the social imbalance, the political and cultural dysfunctions. This approach and negotiation of issues provides a surprising scenography of human civilization where, among others, Baron Munchausen, the dancer Isadora Duncan, the poet Sergei Giesenin, and the politician Anatoly Lunacharsky “dance” with hybrid and bizarre forms in which the human element is associated with the animal and the real to the dream. In the exhibition, Georgy Litichevsky also showed us a large (25×2.5m) project entitled Gigantovatrachomyochoroi (Gigantfrogmousedances), which he created during his stay in Thessaloniki.

[dropcap size=big]B[/dropcap]y the end of the tour, the artist encouraged us to watch two videos in a dark room on the second floor of the exhibition. The first video contains a ballet version of the first chapter entitled Taman from the famous book by Mikhail Lermontov The hero of our time, with a short description in English. Τhe second video titled Lesson of Drawing is based on the performance Everybody is an artist – Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler by the German artist Joseph Beyus. By this, Litichevsky wants to prove that art is addressed to everyone and with the words «Every cow is an artist» he presents the artist’s effort to teach Austrian cows how to paint.