Dates: 27.09.2024 – 01.12.2024

Venue: In artibus Foundation

For In artibus Foundation the year 2024 is a double jubilee. Firstly, the foundation is ten years old. In that period there have been around forty exhibitions in the space on Prechistenskaya Naberezhnaya and the foundation has published more than twenty books on classical and contemporary art. Secondly, this year is the centenary of Vladimir Weisberg (1924–1985), who combined classical tradition and innovation in his work, an artist who is very important for the foundation and who has, in a way, set the tone for the foundation’s activities.

The foundation began its work in 2014 with the exhibition Vladimir Weisberg. In Love with Classical Art, which featured works Russian museums and private collections. Since then, the foundation has regularly shown the artist. Observing a constant and growing interest in Weisberg’s work in the professional sphere, the organizers of the foundation were convinced of the need to support this interest not only within the art community but also among broader circles of art lovers.

This year the foundation was one of the organizers of Weisberg’s anniversary exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, lending more than twenty works from Inna Bazhenova’s collection. Naturally it could not fail to mark the occasion on its own territory as well.

This exhibition of Vladimir Weisberg is the foundation’s fourth. It is made up of new acquisitions from Inna Bazhenova’s collection which have been acquired in the past two years.

Vladimir Weisberg’s art forms a special accent in the collection of Inna Bazhenova, the founder of In artibus Foundation. The fact that there is a collection of Weisberg within a larger collection focused on Western European painting is evidence that this artist’s work is seen here as within the global history of art, and for the collector this part is very important.

Vladimir Weisberg did not consider himself a draughtsman and did not keep a register of his works on paper, although drawings are an integral part of his oeuvre. In the 1940s and 1950s Weisberg was a student and young artist, learning the illusionistic and largely portrait-style drawing of the Mashkov school. He then moved away from this in the 1960s in search of his own motif and material. Experimenting with charcoal, sanguine, coloured pencils, ball-point and felt-tip pens and washes, he aimed to reveal his abilities and preferences, exploring how the line, the spot and the dot are connected on the white paper surface. From the 1960s Weisberg’s main drawing genres would be the nude and the landscape. By that time his works on paper encompassed the entire spectrum of drawing, from the linear to the tonal. In the 1970s and 1980s Weisberg’s sensitive and spontaneous drawings gradually became more analytical. The artist accepted his formal preferences. His range encompassed both “sculptural” or classical linear drawings made complex using tonal relationships and “painter’s drawings” using India ink and washes that were closer to watercolours. The drawings of this period are a partial representation of the artist’s painterly gift. Weisberg also used value drawing, in which various degrees of light saturation of black and white creates the sensation of colour.

Weisberg’s drawings in Inna Bazhenova’s collection date from the 1960s to the 1980s and encompass all four genres: the portrait, the nude, the landscape and the still life.

The logic of development of In artibus foundation in conjunction with her interest in the work of Weisberg gave Inna Bazhenova the idea of registering the Vladimir Weisberg Foundation. It will not replace In artibus, instead becoming one of its strategic directions. The Vladimir Weisberg Foundation was created to preserve and promote the artist’s creative heritage. A significant part of its work is made up of cultural projects, such as exhibitions, presentations and seminars. The foundation will continue to produce publications and will also protect Vladimir Weisberg’s heritage from fakes, producing expert opinions and attributions of his work. The foundation’s principal aim is to create a complete catalogue of Vladimir Weisberg’s work that will be openly accessible.