For Immediate Release
Woodbury, CT - Fenn Gallery once again welcomes Moscow artist Sveta Rumak in “Russia Revisited”, a solo exhibition which runs from Thursday Nov. 1 - Sunday, Dec. 9, 2007. The public is invited to the Opening Reception on Sat. Nov. 3rd from 4-6 pm. On display are twenty four new paintings by Sveta Rumak, who first debuted her artwork in this country at Fenn Gallery in 2005. Ms. Rumak’s enigmatic paintings are a rich synthesis of her unique visual vocabulary with medieval russian iconography. Her canvases are inhabited by humans and animals rendered in an earthy palette with touches of gilding, set against very stylized and highly textured backgrounds. Like medieval Orthodox icons, her people have enlarged almond eyes with an otherworldly cast and long straight noses. The elongated figures seem weightless, and float in a spiritual atmosphere of spacelessness, without mass or shadow-casting volume. Also typical of icons, Rumak juxtaposes flat figures in ornately patterned garments with more fully modeled heads. The great Russian author and philosopher, Leo Tolstoy, wrote that “music is the shorthand of emotion.“ Rumak’s “Gentle Tune” depicts a winged woman in a diaphanous golden sheath; with eyes closed in a meditative posture, she plays her flute. The entrancing figure floats upon a field of scrumbled layers of amber, rust and saffron amongst brooding clouds in deep lavender. Does the moody, dreamlike landscape represent memories evoked by her song- shorthand of her emotion- or does she play to a watchful spirit? Perhaps the placid figure is a personification of hope and refuge, while the scarred landscape of which she is a part, and yet not, is a metaphor for a wounded world or spirit. Ms. Rumak has a BFA, exhibits in Europe, and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Tatarstan. She is a member of the National Artist’s Union of Russia, The Moscow Social Organization of Artists and The International Federation of Artists and Creative Union of Russia.
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