Exhibitions:
Since 1975 - participant in All-Union, Republican and Moscow art exhibitions.
1980: Award of the Tallinn print Triennale.
1984,1988,1992: participant in Biennale of book design in Brno, Czechia.
1996: participant in group exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Germany, USA, Japan, Bulgaria.
1993: exhibition of the group "Bush" at the Central House of Artists, Moscow.
1994: gallery "Collection" at the Central House of Artists, Moscow.
1995: gallery "Moscow Palette", exhibition commemorating M.Yankilevich.
1995: exhibition of the group "Bush" at the Vitebsk Art Museum, Belarus.
Collections:
Works are kept in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of A.BIok in Shakhmatovo, in the Jewish Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania.
Private collections in the USA and Israel.
Yuri Ryzhik
Short biography:
1936: born in Moscow.
Graduated from Moscow Secondary Art School and the Moscow Surikov Institute.
Artist's path:
For the most part the illustrations drawn by Yuri Ryzhik are not meant for specific books. They are best described as graphic works based on motifs from Gogol, Hoffman, Thomas Mann, Maeterlinck, Kafka, Babel or Bruno Schulz. The artist's choice of literary sources speaks for itself: he opts for the fantasmagoric, the grotesque. In perfect accord with these is the expressionist language of Ryzhik's drawings: in drypoints, lithographs and gouaches alike, there are dynamic forms, a maze of lines, sombre gaps which all of a sudden explode with light and colour.
The literary slant of the artist's creativity leads one to interpret his easel-size gouache townscapes and views of bus stops in the context of themes that had already been elaborated in writing. Transfigured reality may provide an asylum for those who are lost in the maze of existence. In Ryzhik's works they seem to have lost control over space, which makes them huddle and form a line at the edge of the picture's space, as if it were a theatre forestage, in anticipation of the miracle of change. Even though human beings and "concern for the humane" make up the core of this artistic system, the characters' figures come into view as if making their way through clusters of hatches and stains; they seem to struggle with approaching darkness, risking to be lost in the chaotic turbulence of the outside world which is threatening to absorb them. The existentialist drama reveals its everlasting compositional principle: the suffering personage and the hostile environment, which the artist alone has the power to remake.
The experience of the 20th century has put a question over the validity of romantic expectations. Looking at Ryzhik's works prompted by diverse texts, one can discern a tendency to feature the theme of retribution for artistic wilfulness: absorption in play, in its turn, is fraught with madness, with the dark and the grotesque. Yet the romantic theme of hope is quite audible in the artist's graphic work, especially where the motif of remembrance, compassion and togetherness emerges to oppose the darkness. While avoiding narrative exposition, Yuri Ryzhik treats literature as an open semantic field, bringing out its individual "raw-nerve" points, which have lost none of their urgency to this day.
Galina Yelshevskaya
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