èצӰÏñ

Andrei Krasulin: A Conversation and Retrospective of Work 23 January 2008, 5:15 PM. Cummings Art Building, Art 2. Poster.

Sponsored by: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Art and Art History, èצӰÏñ Institute for Creativity and the Arts, Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies

Introduction by Professor Gregory Freidin:

ANDREI NIKOLAEVICH KRASULIN was born in Moscow in 1934. He took up sculpting seriously when he was still in high school. In 1953, he enrolled in the Stroganov Higher School of Art and Design, concentrating on monumental and decorative sculpture. In his own words, this schooling filled him with revulsion against the conventional conception, prevalent in post-WWII Russia, of what constituted sculpture. When I knew him in the 1960s and early 1970s (I emigrated in 1971 and did not go back till 1988), he preferred to work in wood and metal, with a strong bias towards two-dimensional art. When we reconnected in 1988, he had already become a full-blown painter, graphic artist, and calligrapher. He returned to sculpture in the 1990s and since then has been working in all media. Never a conceptualist, Krasulin is, perhaps, the most learned and profound among Russian artist today.

Like George Balanchine's choreography, which may be seen and experienced as spatialized music, Krasulin's art, rooted as it is in the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, may be seen and experienced as thought-literary, religious, philosophical-materialized in line, color, volume, texture, and mass. In the last two decades, he has been experiencing an explosion of creativity, and we at èצӰÏñ are truly privileged to be hosting him and witnessing the making of his works. While at èצӰÏñ, he plans to produce a series of pieces and exhibit them before returning to Moscow.

Andrey Krasulin is also part of a creative couple. His wife, Liudmila Ulitskaya, a celebrated Russian novelist and playwright, will be Writer in Residence in our College of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. For many years, she and her husband, as she once put it, have been tapping the same sources of inspiration.

To pay homage to this convergence of an artist and a writer, to materialize it, Krasulin created a series of etching using actual manuscript pages of Ulitskaya's had-written drafts. An exhibition, Etchings (Oforty), made up of these pieces was on display a few years ago at Moscow's famous Foreign Literature Library. In 2004, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which has several of Krasulin's pieces on permanent display, held a personal retrospective of his art, entitled "Obraz zhizni"-a way of life, a manner of living, even life-style and an icon of life. This exhibition was proclaimed the most important art event of that year in Moscow.

Today, Krasulin is one of the most sought-after artists in Russian and Europe. At èצӰÏñ, Andrei Krasulin will give a guest of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature . He will give a lecture-presentation on his art and a lecture on the relationship between modern Russian poetry and modern Russian art, in part based on his recent work, a memorial for the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.