Olga Tobreluts: Family Portrait: Mother
Artist(s):
Title:
- Family Portrait: Mother
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 1997
Medium:
- Digital Photography
Size:
- 59" x 44"
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
Family Portrait in an Interior Scene from European History
St. Petersburg’s late-20th-century neoacademicism is a direct continuation of the classical style of ancient times and of every manifestation of that style in European classicism. The classical style has proved so stable and persistent over the centuries that it makes sense to consider all other European styles as mere deviations from that basic form. From this point of view, classicism/academicism seems an internal and inalienable feature of our racial consciousness.
Having little understanding of the great tasks set them by their parents, the children of this age saw themselves as belonging to the lost generation of the existential European past. The relative calm that settled upon their lives shattered their internal unity. Moreover, they were tired of history and all its wars and were anxious to “erase” everything from their memories and “become like everyone else.” They tried to present themselves as a generation apart from the heroic victory at Hanko, and as a result made themselves even more tired.
This portrait of a man and a woman is bereft of any connection, and even of any appearance of a connection, with the world and kin. Only the couple’s faces themselves preserve an inexorable link with the biological kin of which they are the latest representatives; but with this commences the rebirth of the broken link whose full restoration will come only with the couple’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Alena Spitsyna
From the SCARP project catalog
