Tatyana Nazarenko

Biography

In 1969 an exhibition of Tatyana Nazarenko’s work was due to open on Kuznetsky Most. The paintings were already hung, the Party bureau and every other authority had passed the show, and the chairman of MOSKh, the Moscow branch of the Artists’ Union, had personally checked that everything was as it should be. Then a notice appeared on the door: “Exhibition closed for technical reasons.” This is how the artist herself told the story; the show was never opened.

She was twenty-five, and that same year she was admitted to the Artists’ Union of the USSR.

She was born on 24 June 1944 in Moscow and grew up in the centre of the city, on Plyushchikha, in a house from the early twentieth century with stained glass, lions’ heads holding chains, coffered ceilings and two back staircases. In one of the flats, she says, there was a fountain. She loved old Moscow from childhood, and the theme of the city kept returning in her work. In 1955–1962 Nazarenko studied at the Moscow Secondary Art School, then until 1968 at the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute, in the studios of Aleksei Gritsai and Dmitry Zhilinsky. In 1969–1972 she worked in a studio of the USSR Academy of Arts under Geli Korzhev. To my mind, both schools show in her early work: the large format and historical subject from Korzhev, the attention to faces and everyday detail from her other teachers.

Her first exhibition took place in 1966. After the institute she faced the usual tasks of a young artist: to join the Union, find a studio, earn a living. Commissions came from the “Kombinat”, the Union’s commercial workshops: fairy-tale heroes for kindergartens, endless Lenins with a log for houses of culture. Do one of those, she recalled, and the money lasted half a year of working for herself.

In 1972 she received the Moscow Komsomol Prize for “Execution of the Narodniks”, which is held by the Russian Museum. Among her early works in the Tretyakov Gallery are “Decembrists. Uprising of the Chernigov Regiment” (1978), “Partisans Have Come” (1975) and “Moscow Evening” (1978). An international exhibition in Sofia in 1976 brought her a first prize; in 1978 she went to the International Summer School of Arts in Voss, Norway, and in 1987 she received a silver medal of the USSR Academy of Arts. Her first solo shows came in the same year, 1987: in Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv, and in Leverkusen. In 1988, at the invitation of Peter Ludwig, she went to Cologne for the exhibition “Russian Art”, and she took part in the Sotheby’s sale in Moscow. Her first solo show in Moscow, at the Central House of Artists, was held in 1989, the year of her first trip to New York. In 1993 she received the State Prize of Russia for the exhibition “Tatyana’s Day” at the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1997 Nazarenko became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts, in 2001 a full member, and since 2001 she has sat on the academy’s presidium. Other titles and awards followed: the Moscow Government Prize (1999), Honoured Artist of Russia (2003), the academy’s gold medal (2004), the Triumph Prize (2008) and People’s Artist of Russia (2014).

In 1995–1996 the Central House of Artists showed her installation “Transition”: 120 life-size plywood figures, painted like trompe-l’oeil cut-outs. They are the people of a Moscow underpass in the 1990s: homeless people, beggars, the disabled. She remembered in particular the blind men with large balalaikas whom she had seen near Dzerzhinsky Square: they sit there looking cheerful, but they cannot see, and when there are many of them the sight is dreadful. The installation was later shown in Germany, the United States, Austria and Finland; after an exhibition in New York in 2012, critics called her an absurdist realist. She herself put it more simply: she painted what she saw around her, and if she drew drunks with glasses in their hands, they really did stand like that, and she did not look for deeper meanings.

In 2004 the Tretyakov Gallery showed full-size sculpted figures alongside her paintings. In 2006, at the exhibition “Vanishing Reality” in the Russian Museum, there was a large installation, “Explosion”, made of polyurethane foam figures; visitors wrote in the comments book that children should not be allowed to see it, and the artist replied that she was reflecting the world around her. In 2008 she made a video project. Among her more recent exhibitions are “Dialogue with Time” at the Russian Academy of Arts (2019), which presented more than forty paintings, thirty graphic sheets, an installation and art objects; “The Future in the Past” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2020); and “The Stories of Tatyana Nazarenko” in Nizhny Tagil (2023). She is known for the series “Family Album” and “People Animals”.

In 1999–2016 she was a professor and head of a studio at the Surikov Institute. Her works are in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, and in foreign collections, among them Washington, Budapest, Beijing, Sofia, Berlin and Aachen.