Otari Kandaurov. Temple of Culture: Iconostasis of Geniuses / 2015-2017 /

The exhibition «Otari Kandaurov. The Temple of Culture: Iconostasis of Geniuses /2015-2017/» is open from June 24 to July 23, 2017, at the Theatre Gallery of Malaya Ordynka Street, a branch of the A.A. Bakhrushin Theatre Museum. It displays the artist’s works made over the past two years.

Otari Kandaurov presents over 100 portraits of cultural figures from different times and countries. According to the artist, these persons «represent the true color of society – the cultural elite of mankind». Author selected from a large series of works the representatives of European culture: philosophers, thinkers, artists, composers, architects and those who combined several functions in themselves.

Graphic works of Otari Kandaurov are created with the use of watercolor and pencil. The graphic portraits combined in cycles do not compete with each other – on the contrary, they complement each other creating a single ensemble. There are portraits of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, Plato and Voltaire, Peter Brueghel the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Dürer and Diego Vélasquez, philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Rachmaninov, Antonio Gaudi, Friedrich Schiller and many others.

The author managed to move away from stereotyped images of his characters, to reveal the complex inner world of everyone concisely expressing the main line of their life and creativity. His portraits turn into «faces» freed from temporary things and the canvases become enriched with semantic symbolic details.