Yan Antonyshev
Vlad Zherebyatin
Irina Sheitman
Saida Fagala
Anna
Ataeva
Elena Azernaya
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Mr. Antonyshev is a native of Leningrad, born in 1965, and has devoted his entire life to depicting the pre-Revolutionary architecture of the city.
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For those not entirely up on the city’s history, in 1991, Leningrad’s name was changed back to its pre-1914 name, Sankt Peterburg, the Dutch pronunciation of Saint Petersburg. Fortunately, Antonyshev’s favorite neighborhood, Kolomna, has not had any name changes from its founding in the early Eighteenth Century until the present. Located near the famed Admiralty Building, the Kolomna neighborhood until the last three decades was an intact enclave of buildings from the mid-Eighteenth to the late Nineteenth Century. Antonyshev’s oeuvre consists of studies of buildings still standing and, increasingly, destroyed to make way for new construction. His works, usually pastels on paper, reflect his view that old buildings contain a species of soul.
Antonyshev recalls that when he was sixteen, he and six other aspiring teenage artists met at the Gorsky suburban train station – he recalls the date as November 6, 1981 – and decided to form an artist’s circle that they dubbed “Old Town People.” That was a bit aspirational and a bit cheeky, since they used English for their group’s name.
Antonyshev himself back then had the surname Talantov, the surname of his maternal grandfather. Since talent is a loan word into Russian that carries the same meanings that it has in English, he decided to avoid the certain ribbing he would receive from fellow art students and teachers by using another family name, his father’s. In 1984 the group, now art students, were written about in a publication named “Smena.” An editor told the young artists that an English name would not do for patriotic Soviet citizens and renamed them in the article “Stariy Gorod,” which in English simply means “old city.”
After graduation, Antonyshev in 1985 was accepted into the Artist’s Union of the USSR and became an official artist, an important distinction at the time that allowed him to rent studio space, purchase art materials and so on.
Today, the Stariy Gorod circle is still in existence, though with only four members, and has exhibitions in Saint Petersburg and Moscow as well as abroad. At least one Russian dealer dubbed their style “avant-garde” and someone else has used the term “Fantastic Realism”. In essence, it is a representational style with symbolic and narrative elements that recalls such Russian Modernists as Marc Chagall. For those who have spent time in Saint Petersburg and have formed an emotional bond with that haunted and haunting city, Antonyshev’s works invariably strike an emotional cord. |
