Grotesque metamorphoses of the motif of ancient Russian architecture in the work of N.D. Gritsiuk

Abstract

The article examines the process of formation of grotesque imagery in the work of the Novosibirsk artist N.D. Gritsiuk (1922–1976) on the example of the transformation of the motif of ancient Russian architecture in the series “Fantasies and interpretationsˮ. The source of the grotesque compositions are scribbles from the artist’s travel albums, created on the principle of automatic writing from fragments of ancient Russian architecture, silhouettes of a Dymkovo toy and parts of the human body. In the process of creative searches, these combined grotesques organically transform into independent carnival compositions, reflecting the author has detached ironic attitude to folklore motifs and plots. In the compositions of the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, while maintaining the grotesque imagery, irony is replaced by an alarming intonation of uncertainty. Placed in a restless, colour saturated space, the temples turn into deformed and disjointed anthropomorphic hybrid images, which reflect the existential experiences of the artist. Reality becomes ambiguous and unsteady for Gritsiuk, and he considers it from the angle of absurdity and phantasmagorical assumptions. The emergence of a tragic pandemonium, associatively read by the viewer as a symbol of the doomsday, testifies to the artist's reflections on the manifestations of the spiritual, the transcendent. The spiritual and at the same time absurdist problematic of hybrid images brings Gritsiukʼs search, on the one hand, to the metaphysical painting of M.M. Shvartsman and E.A. Steinberg, and on the other hand, to the grotesque art of the sculptors E.I. Neizvestny and V.A. Sidur. Thus, in the conditions of the dominant realistic discourse, the grotesque as a technique allowed the Novosibirsk artist to immerse himself in the symbolic space of free self-expression and come into contact with the world of the transcendent.