Reclusive Artist Alexander Aizenshtat Exhibits at Moscow Museum of Modern Art

MOSCOW.- The “Spectrum of life” exhibition by Alexander Aizenshtat will be on view in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art at Tverskoy Boulevard from January 15. His name is not widely known to the public, since the master deliberately avoids active exhibition activities. The renunciation of success and vanity is the artist’s policy. The wonderful phenomenon of the master lies in the unique “space of silence”, surrounding his whole oeuvre. Not only because the talent of Aizenshtat demands silence and concentration from the viewer. Perception of his genre paintings receives a philosophic aspect. Regardless of the plot, the ontological importance, correlation with the highest principle is perceptible in them.

Alexander Aizenshtat belongs to the rare “intuitive” type of artists, who gets the main stimulus for creativity from within. The complicated geography of life, i.e. Jerusalem, Tsfat, Paris, Rome, Moscow, has left special traces on his art, which is difficult to link to any definite cultural environment. Alexander Aizenshtat was born and grew up in Moscow. At the late 1960ies he studied painting in the studio of the artist S.P. Skulsky. He left the USSR in 1974. Aizenshtat is a citizen of France, lives in Israel, but likes painting in Jerusalem and Moscow Oblast. The “Spectrum of life” exhibition contains about 70 works of the recent years, divided into the following series: “Spectrum of life”, “City”, “Toys”, “Still-lifes”, “Silhouettes”, “Kafka”.

Aizenshtat’s painting is unhurried and restrained. It is basically ascetic. Many artworks are monochromic, but the absence of bright colors just accentuates the variety of meanings, that hides in his pictures, and creates a special metaphoric space, saturated with cultural reminiscences. Canvases of the master unintentionally remind of the images by Munch, Kirchner, Shterenberg, Chagall, and together demonstrate the author’s style, distinctive and easily recognizable, where the national and religious principles unite with a universal one. Aizenshtat’s painting is metaphysical; if we try to define a “genre” of his works, we will find out that the literary philosophical genre of the fable that involves moving from a set of specific facts to a general conclusion, will turn out to be the closest. Aizenshtat’s artworks, understandable out of the specific historical context, made in a moving poetic language, like Socratic Method, put many questions to the viewer, who has to find the answers by himself.

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