"LITOGRAPHY"
Irina Vasilieva, Ivan Sotnikov, Oleg Katelnikov,
Vladimir Yashke, Andre Sugnaux, Andrey Khlobystin,
Konstantin Sutiagin, Svetlana Sutiagina
Different printing techniques 
In the Small hall

"…the traditional role of prints as bearers of visual information had not been lost in the society. The first decades of the century saw the heyday of the art of professional printers, who virtuously worked with forms engraved by artists. Each firm trading in art was sure to deal with printing production (from the book about MAX BECKMAN)”

Somehow collectors and lovers of fine art have developed a strange and unfair attitude towards printed graphics as to something secondary and unnecessary. Moreover, some owners of big art collections in principle do not pay any attention to graphic (or printed graphic) works by their favourite artists. It is not clever, for almost all meaningful artists dealt to some extent with printed graphics in some manner or technique. The “Arefyev circle”, for example, will be represented by its printed  graphics  on the 7th of March 2009 in the Museum of Non-Conformism at the Art-Centre “Pushkinskaya”. But they did not make lithographs – you cannot keep a lithographic machine at home and there was just a limited amount of such machines in Soviet Russia.  Arefyev, and later the others, was a member of the “GorCom of graphic artists”, but they did not make any lithographs as members of this GorCom. Frankly speaking, they did not do anything there, their membership being just nominal, only to have the official “artists’ papers” – to protect themselves from being sued for “parasitism” in Soviet times. And who would have allowed them do anything? Every lithographic machine was numbered and supervised. They say that suspect printers or even simple technical workers with previous convictions were not allowed to approach lithographic machines, to say nothing about artists. It was a rare case when somebody managed to print lithographs in the Soviet era, O. Frontinsky being a happy exception to that common rule.  The exhibition in the Borey Art Gallery presents works done during the previous year by several artists: Irina Vasilieva , Ivan Sotnikov, Oleg Katelnikov, Vladimir Yashke, Konstantin & Svetlana Sutiagini (Moskow)  Andre Sugnaux (Switzerland), Andrey Khlobystin, and maybe by some other artists.