Artist of the Day, March 27, 2021: Georgy Kurasov, a Russian painter (#1242)

Georgy Kurasov (1958) was born in the USSR, in what was then Leningrad. He still lives and works in the same place. Without any effort on his part whatsoever, Georgy seems to have emigrated from one surreal country to another.

His native city was irrational from the very moment of its foundation. Situated on the same latitude as the southern shores of Alaska, on the swampy delta of the River Neva where no one had ever settled before, this new capital city grew up on the very edge of a monstrous empire.
Here on the totally flat surface carved across by rivers, streams and canals, European architects laid out, like images on a canvas, straight avenues, streets and squares, they built Greco-Roman porticoes and Baroque palazzi, erected sculptures and fountains, amidst something akin to permafrost where half the year is dominated by ice and frost and the other half by damp and rain.

Georgy spent his childhood on the Petrograd Side, to the north of the city, in a tiny little flat with windows that looked out onto an even tinier courtyard. As far as he recalls, he modeled things in plasticine and drew resting on the vast wooden windowsills. Not so much aesthetic pastimes as compensations for the grey minimalism of everyday life, the absence of light and bright colors.
At thirteen years old his mother put him in the art school attached to the Academy of Arts. At the interview it was politely explained that there was nothing for Georgy in the painting department since he had a total lack of feeling for color. So they suggested Georgy Kurasov join the sculpture class. That was when he began his professional training.

In 1977 Georgy Kurasov entered the sculpture department of the Academy of Arts.
He spent six years in the vast studio of a building erected during the time of Catherine the Great, in the late 18th century. Those gloomy, narrow, incredibly high vaulted corridors, the vast, cold, grimy studios, everything was inhabited by the ghosts of long dead masters of ages past, whose influence was far more real than the insignificant apologists of Socialist Realism and of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. The Academy was a solid amalgamation of temple to and prison of the arts. Yet those years in the Academy were the best years of his life. Nearly all Georgy’s friends and colleagues date from those years.

The circles he moved in were intellectual, talented, young – which meant free, with the exception of the one or two informers that were simply an obligatory element of life in those years and did little to alter the overall picture.

It was then that Georgy met his wonderful Zina, who was later to occupy nearly all his space, both physical, in his life, and creative, in his works.

Almost immediately after his diploma Georgy Kurasov was called up for army service, but even there he was armed not with a rifle but with paints, since he was lucky enough to be appointed Court Artist to his general.

In 1984 Georgy Kurasov was at last demoted. He was free.

That same year, he married Zinaida (Zina), a Russian ice ballerina, who became the model for many of his works. In 1982, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture and Painting and was invited to join the exclusive Russian Union of Artists. He was allocated his tiny studio, and thought he was at the very peak of happiness. All around him the country was in turmoil, at the very heights of Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’, people passionately quenching their thirst for information whilst battling with a hunger of somewhat more concrete physical nature caused by food shortages.

Things were now rather difficult for artists, particularly as far as sculpture was concerned. Sculpture, as is well known, is an art form for either rich or totalitarian states. The totalitarian state had ceased to exist but it had not become rich.

Georgy Kurasov started to paint, but it soon became clear that selling his pictures for any acceptable price was going to be impossible, and so he had to feed his family by producing small pastels which Georgy sold through small galleries dealing mainly in souvenirs for foreign tourists.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. By that time Kurasov had put together a large body of paintings, but had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with them. The future looked bleak.

Then in 1993 his works were first exhibited in the USA. Since then, Georgy Kurasov have exhibited and sold his paintings exclusively in North America.

It is many years since he dropped out of the world of sculpture in Russia, and he never formed part of the world of painting there. Kurasov knows there are plenty of people who, noting the absence of his works at Russian exhibitions, think he has emigrated.

Americans see Georgy Kurasov as a Russian artist, Russians as an American artist. Painters think he is a sculptor. Sculptors are sure he is a painter.

And when Georgy Kurasov thinks of it, he rather like this borderline existence. Perhaps it what makes it possible to be himself, to be unlike anyone else.

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Georgy Kurasov

1992 
A Movement  

1993
Jesus Before The Judgment 

1994

A Birth of a Shape 

1996
Rape of Europe

1999
A Bicycle Tour

1999
Palace Romance

2001
Islander

2001
Lera

2001
Love letter

2001
The Meeting

2002
A Portrait Of Mrs. Keis 

2002
Chess' players 

2004
Tondo

2005
The return

2009
Love story

2011
Wounded Amazon

2013
The Battle of Amazon and Centaurs 

2014
Analytic research of building Baroque’s composition 

2014
Tango

2015
Odysseus sailed past the island of the Sirens 

2015
Portrait in a Gothic style 

2015
Chess

2015
In the café

2015
Sunny dreams 

2016
Apples of Hesperides: Feat of Hercules #11 

2016
Stargazer

2016
The Dance 

2016
Wounded Amazon II

2017
The Dream

2018
Expectations

2018
Tango-Jazz

2019
Diana

Birth of Myth

Classical Dance