The Steppe Story exhibition of Zorikto Dorzhiev opens in the Marble Palace on 20 August. The exhibition presents over 50 paintings, graphic works and sculptures by the young artist whose oeuvre is closely connected with Buryat and Mongolian legends and mythology: the Asian myth rendered by European expressive means.
Zorikto Dorzhiev was born in 1976 in Ulan-Ude. He studied at the local school of art and then at the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Art, and trained at the Russian Academy of Arts studios. Zorikto managed to take the most essential thing from his academic study — disciplined morphogenesis which proved not to contradict conceptualism.
The artist develops his own version of oriental poetics with its refined elongated silhouettes, muted colours and a kind of somnambulistic self-absorption apparent in the characters. For him, it is the truth of emotional states which is important: an unrestrained impulse, an extreme physical tension, an intellectual stand-off and meditation. Yet the artist perceives himself as a participant in events rather than an observer. He did not so much reconstitute this worldview as actually went through it, supported by his own emotional and life experience.
St Petersburg is another venue of the exhibition of Dorzhiev?s works travelling through the world: New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Moscow. The Khankhalaev Gallery arranged this tour and contributed to the museum?s presentation of Zorikto Dorzhiev?s oeuvre in St Petersburg.
