The pop/off/art Gallery presents Vika Begalskaya’s new painting project “Am I really bored?” This time Begalskaya’s object of investigation is – men. Vika’s men are obviously not boring, which these striking paintings, presented by the artist, clearly show, corresponding to the expressive character of the author.

If one ignores the fact that Vika Begalskaya is a well-recognised, mature video-artist, then her art, by the standards of the new century, turns out to be perfectly classical: canvas, oil, easel-seized, relaxed, but a distinctly recognisable plasticity of painting. Her painting is rooted in one of the main Avant-garde traditions: Begalskaya is an expressionist (and this word cannot be in the feminine, although the subject matter here is strictly female). In her paintings there is everything this term has represented for the whole of the XXth century, from the formal point of view: extremely deafeningly bright colours, clear-cut contrasts, a thick paint texture. And corporeal issues accompany expressionism all throughout its development: the body stands as a testing ground for mutations and modifications of form per se. The deliberate primitive style of painting, the brutality of the message, vision as a challenge – it is all very familiar, done by many, and in Europe over the last decades an almost calculated strategy has developed – to be a pupil of a pupil of Bazelitz or Fetting, not particularly different from others, means guaranteed success.

The more valuable is the frankness which Begalskaya’s canvases contain. Her expression, in the local landscape, is a voice crying in the wilderness: you see, the Russian public, even the professionally trained, does not have the desire nor the experience in perceiving, and what’s more, in accepting purely plastic, “fresh painting” (H. U. Obrist). As a consequence, Russia, which is rich in this tradition, at the beginning of the XXIst century practically does not have any true adherents, spiritually charged figures, – but has only imitators. And here it is appropriate to remember: prior to all the super brands-creators of manifestos of expressionism in Germany, before Kirchner and Nolde, this line appeared in women’s art – in the work of Paula Moderzon-Bekker. Like her, Begalskaya is humbly beating her path alone: poetically expressing (“giving birth to” can also be used!) the feeling of the body, of femininity, of the city, of fear, passion, pain, dancing, shouting… She has one, but significant, advantage over Bekker: the latter did not have a video camera.