Felix Bukh
Short biography:
1948: born in Moscow in the family of the artist Aaron Bukh.
1971 - 1975: studied painting at the evening department of the Moscow Surikov institute.
1982: member of the Soviet Artists' Union.
Artist's path:
The first impression of the work of Felix Bukh is that he justifies the art critic's cliche about an artist's oeuvre amounting to a self-portrait. Painter, graphic and monumental artist, he has a remarkable capacity for work, and his versatility brings to the mind the people of the Renaissance. But, being a man of our times, Bukh upsets the stereotype image of an artist and opts for a paradox involving both reality and genre.
Seemingly against his own grain, he produces solid, philosophically-grounded paintings. Contrary to his own impatient and impulsive nature, he has for years engaged in monumental mosaic — a slow, laborious, hand-craft occupation. In mosaic, SMALL pieces of colored material are used to create LARGE meaningful WHOLES by compressing and condensing semantic energy, which in its turn saturates surrounding space. The point of reference in the relationship of the Large and the Small, on the one hand, and the Whole, on the other, is the "glass-beads game" as a metaphor of creating a speculative image of the world.
Having mastered the techniques of monumental art by working on walls and vaults, Bukh decided to take it out of its traditional spatial context and transfer it to small wooden planks (roughly 20 x 30 centimetres). Nothing daunted, he displays them in large exhibition halls like proper easel works. And these patches of color prove to be able to "hold" the surrounding space. Small as they are, these compositions are charged with condensed plastic pressure and semantic con-tent, and are frankly orientated to the Large. There is no doubt about their belonging to the World Tree. With rare exceptions, the plots are linked to the eternal archetypes (Human Being, Tree, Bird, Fish) or to reminiscences of the "closest" ancestors and neighbours (Egyptian, Jewish or African) - reminiscences of the eternal proto-homeland, with which Bukh demonstratively identifies his art. The archetypal substance of Bukh's mosaic miniatures propels them into Larger space, with a fresh interpretation of the eternal and the contemporary, the single and the whole, the plot and the meaning. This polarity, which is implied, releases (by catharsis) the explosive force of the artist's temperament.
Victoria Volpina
Exhibitions:
1974: at the House of Writers, Moscow.
1976: the 1st All-Union exhibition of drawing at the Remizov St. Exhibition Hall, Moscow.
1978: at the House of Scientists, Moscow.
1979: at the Zholtovsky St. Exhibition Hall, Moscow.
1983: 2nd prize and a diploma of the 15th Exhibition of Young Artists, Moscow.
1988: at the Vavilov St. Exhibition Hall, Moscow.
1989: exhibition in Lithuania and in Israel.
1990: in Rome; at the House of Architects, Moscow.
1991: "Art-Mif-I", Manege, Moscow.
1992: The Central House of Artists, Moscow.
1993: in Berkeley, Stanford and San Francisco, the USA;
World exhibition of Judaica, San Francisco, the USA; one-man exhibition, San Francisco, the USA.
1994: participant in the First International Plein Air «Homage to Mark Chagall», Vitebsk;
one-man exhibition in the «Old Garden» gallery, Moscow.
1995: exhibition in the «Estate» gallery, Moscow.
Work as designer in: Cafe in the town of Grivna, Moscow region, (concrete and wood relief); House of Culture in the town of Gus-Khrustalny (plafond-painting and wood relief).
Collections:
The State Museum of Arts, Tbilisi.
Pavlovsk Art Galiery (Altai).
Krasnoyarsk Art Gallery.
The Jewish Museum, Lithuania.
Private collections in Russia, Europe, the USA, Israel, Japan.
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