Light and shadow

Details

Oleg Vassiliev (1931-2013)
Light and shadow
signed in Cyrillic, further signed with Cyrillic initials, inscribed with title, further inscribed with title in Russian and dated ‘O. Vasil’ev/1991’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
31½ x 27¾ in. (80 x 70.5 cm.)

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by the present owner in Oslo in 1999.

Exhibited

Oslo, Blomqvist Kunsthandel AS, Oleg Vassiliev: Works 1987-1999, 30 October-14 November 1999.

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Lot Essay

Focusing characteristically on the theme of memory, the present work was acquired at Oleg Vassiliev’s solo exhibition in Oslo in 1999 for which the artist’s great friend Eric Bulatov wrote the catalogue introduction. In it Bulatov described Vassiliev and Marcel Proust as the only people able to ‘Stop time, to enlighten that moment in its continuous transformation and immobilise it for ever. It is not that moment we now live, but something gone, that with an incomprehensible association with the present, enlightens clearly in our conscience and becomes unreachable.’ (Exhibition catalogue, Oleg Vassiliev: Works 1987-1999, 1999, p. 4). Likely a depiction of the artist’s wife, portrayed within a glow of glorious technicolour reminiscent of a 1960s dream sequence, the figure’s positioning, facing away from us, serves to heighten the sense that the scene is something temporal and fleeting.

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