05.05.2024
My Father. Lev Tabenkin
Let us ask ourselves the question: what takes the place in Ilya Tabenkin’s pictures? Against drapery resembling a theatrical backdrop we observe the existence of human figures — they are simplified in childlike fashion, at once sad and amusing — and of birds, and of animals. Observe them closely. A startling and profound world is revealed, created with deliberately limited means.
14.10.2021
Ilya Tabenkin and His Invented Language
Why is Ilya Tabenkin a revolutionary artist, a phenomenon of a special order in the visual arts? First of all, because there are new meanings in his work at different levels of perception. It is like the cultural layers of an ancient civilization: some of them are already clear to us, while others have yet to be discovered, unraveled and admired.
20.09.2021
Ilya Tabenkin is avant-garde and traditional. Vera Tchaikovskaya.
I think it does not often happen that an artist already at the beginning of his creative career takes on his face in art. More often — the gradual development and accumulation of artistic experience. In my opinion, it is imperative to go through many stages of development, and the first of them is liberation from imitation, learned techniques, which inevitably become a cliché. Sooner or later, but there is a desire to drop a lot in search of your own vision of the world. For me, this process is long and uneven. After graduating from the V.I. Surikov, I was at a loss for a long time. He painted landscapes similar in the choice of motives and in the manner of work to Levitan. I painfully searched, tried and did not find something that would bring at least a bit of creative satisfaction. Perhaps it was only in the early 1960s that I was able to determine the necessary direction of the search.
In this sense, I was greatly influenced by my participation in a group exhibition of sixteen artists (1968).
01.09.2021
Ilya Tabenkin (1981) World of still life
I think it does not often happen that an artist already at the beginning of his creative career takes on his face in art. More often — the gradual development and accumulation of artistic experience. In my opinion, it is imperative to go through many stages of development, and the first of them is liberation from imitation, learned techniques, which inevitably become a cliché. Sooner or later, but there is a desire to drop a lot in search of your own vision of the world. For me, this process is long and uneven. After graduating from the V.I. Surikov, I was at a loss for a long time. He painted landscapes similar in the choice of motives and in the manner of work to Levitan. I painfully searched, tried and did not find something that would bring at least a bit of creative satisfaction. Perhaps it was only in the early 1960s that I was able to determine the necessary direction of the search.
In this sense, I was greatly influenced by my participation in a group exhibition of sixteen artists (1968).
22.08.2021
Thirsty for joy about the work of Ilya Tabenkin. Vera Tchaikovskaya.
Two decades have passed since the death of the artist Ilya Tabenkin. And now you can look again at his works, because with an artist of this scale they acquire new depth over time, acquire new meanings.
But there are still few people willing to speak out on it.
the occasion, painting is not «given»: it does not have any «intellectual» notions, to which modern artists are so eager, but there is a striking inner concentration of thought and feeling.