WINTER EXHIBITION AT MoRA 2019

December 14th, 2019 – January 11th, 2020

Museum open: Saturday, Sunday from 1 pm to 5 pm

OPENING RECEPTION WITH ARTISTS

Saturday, December 14th 6PM – 10PM

Open Wine Bar, H’orderves will be served
Recomended admission $10
For more information contact:Boris Belenky, MoRA Director:
917-921-1003
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

VLADIMIR DEMING
GERARD BARBOT
GEORGE CONRAD
MARINA DUVIDZON
MIROSLAV DUZINKEVICH
ISABELLA GLAZ
GRIGORY GUREVICH
VLADIMIR ISURIN
VASILY KAFANOV
SVETLANA KOKSHAROVA
IRENE KOVAL
SASHA LEVIN
IGOR SATANOVSKY
YULIYA SIDOROVA
YURY SAVCHENKO
EMIL SILBERMAN
VALERIA SOBOLEVSKAYA

George Conrad was born in Newark, NJ in 1916 and died at age 85 on November 13th, 2001. At a very early age he began painting and taking photographs and eventually graduated from the High School of the Arts and Sciences in Newark. While he was a student, Conrad apprenticed under the Mexican artist David Siquerros, who is best known for his creation of “Mexican Muralism” with world-renowned Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Conrad worked with David Siquerros on a commissioned painting of George and Ira Gershwin.

Conrad taught at the University of Illinois before joining what was then Glassboro College in 1958. He was hired to establish an art department, and went on to develop the school’s bachelor’s and master’s degree program in art. He specialized in Renaissance art history.

A Professor of art education at Illinois State University from 1949 to 1958 and from 1958, professor of art history at Glassboro State College, George Conrad lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He studied at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree. He earned his Master’s Degree at Columbia University.

He was hired to establish an art department, and went on to develop the school’s bachelor’s and master’s degree program in art. He specialized in Renaissance art history.

He was a founding member of the New Jersey State Council of the Arts and was past President of the New Jersey Art Education Association, as well as a member of the National Art Education Association. He was also a painter, with works in collections of the La Jolla Museum of Art in San Diego and the Wisconsin Museum of Contemporary Art. Until his death, he maintained a studio on 12th Street in Philadelphia.

VLADIMIR DEMING

Vladimir was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Decorative Art from The Academy of Industrial Art. He designed and produced Stage Jewelry for theaters and movies. In 1974, he emigrated from the USSR and, during the transition to the USA, worked at the Opera House in Vienna and for the Salzburg Theatrical Festival in Austria, designing and executing Stage Jewelry.

In the US he worked for a French Jewelry Company designing jewelry, then for Monet Jewelry Company.

Vladimir taught Hand-Crafted Jewelry and Restoration of Ceramics for thirty years at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. For the past thirty-six years, he has been designing jewelry for private clients, developing his own collections of Costume Jewelry and teaching private students in his Manhattan studio, which is called The Little Studio.

“When I designed these collections, my aim was to create unique, sophisticated and dramatic jewelry. It is essential that this jewelry would not only complement an outfit but also accentuate its style. Some jewelry from these collections can be worn daily as well as for formal wear.

In my work, I reveal the beauty hidden within the mediums I use. I unify the physical harmony between the jewelry and the body, resulting in a soft, light and comfortable feeling for the wearer.

All of this together, in combination with the simplicity of the flowing designs of the bracelets crafted from Plexiglas, the dramatic combination of Plexiglas with metal, glass and stones, the balanced proportions, the classical and contrasting combination of colors, and the sculpturing techniques result in a specific recognizable style.

I made these collections for the creative woman who wants to look elegant with these artistic accents and dramatic look.”

MIROSLAV DUZINKEVICH

Художник Мирослав Дузинкевич родился в Ивано-Франковской области (западная Украина), в 1994 с отличием окончил Государственную художественную среднюю школу имени Т.Г. Шевченко, Киев, затем в 1995-96 г.г. учился во Всероссийской академия живописи, ваяния и зодчества на факультете факультет живописи в Москве.

1996 – 2002 гг. – Национальная академия изобразительного искусства и архитектуры, факультет живописи, г. Киев, Украина

Дипломная работа М. Дузинкевича «Се Человек» была признана Государственной экзаменационной комиссией Министрества культуры Украины, лучшей дипломной работой года в области академической живописи

1998 г. – обучение в мастерских академиков В.В. Шаталина и М.Е.Гуйды в г. Киев, Украина

С 2006 г. – преподаватель кафедры дизайна Киевского национального университета культуры и искусств г. Киев, Украина.

В начале профессионального пути, Мирослав «отработал» множество разно-жанровых произведений в реалистической манере. Впоследствии художник подготовил ряд произведений, близких к символизму, а также поупражнялся в отделке изысканных интерьеров, флористической и пейзажной живописью, с элементами барочного романтизма.

Недавно, по словам художника, он перешел к эмоциональному стилю «абстрактного импрессионизма».

Художник с большим уважением относится к школе «Передвижников». Как и большинство представителей этого художественного движения, Мирослав много путешествует по миру, чтобы постоянно собирать впечатление, схватывать моменты, а затем одаривать своими работами наши души и дома.

ISABELLA GLAZ

Isabella Glaz was born in Ukraine. After high school, she continued her education at Leningrad Muhin Art Institute and Simferopol Art School, where she studied drawing, painting and art history.

From 1981 to 1986 Isabella studied at Lvov Publishing Academy and graduated with majors in Book Illustration and Art History.

From 1985 to 1988 she participated in many group and single shows in the Ukraine and Russia, as well as illustrated children’s books and designed theatrical costumes.

In 1988 Izabella immigrated to Vienna, Austria where she designed for a small publishing company.

In 1989 she moved to Rome, Italy where she continued to paint, and where many of her pieces now hang in private collections. Isabella Glaz arrived in the United States in 1991 and currently resides and creates in New York City.

Isabella’s work art work exhibiting in US and European galleries and sold to private collectors.

GRIGORY GUREVICH

Sculptor, painter, photographer, graphic artist, printmaker, art book creator, and inventor – has had more than four hundred exhibitions in the United States and Europe and conducted hundreds of sculpture workshops in Italy, Denmark, Russia and the United States. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures have won numerous awards and are in public and private collections in Russia, Switzerland, France, Croatia, Germany, Slovakia and the United States.

He has had his solo shows in Savitsky Museum in Penza city in Russia in July 2010 and August 2012 and many shows in the Museum of Russian Art in the United States. He received a master’s degree in art from Academy of Fine and Industrial Arts in Leningrad, Russia and was a professor at St. John’s University, New York, and a faculty member of Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts.

His bronze tableau of seven life-size figures entitled “The Commuters”, sculpted in 1985, is permanently installed in Newark Penn Station.

His bronze bust of Japanese-American Inventor Kazuo Hashimoto is installed in NJIT, Newark, NJ. His book “Reflections” features seventeen linocuts, etchings, and mixed media prints has been included in the print collection of New York Public Library as well as the rare book collection of Newark Museum Library, Library of Saint Bonaventure University, and Print Collection of HERMITAGE MUSEUM in Leningrad, Russia. His work won many awards and honorable mentions. His biography was published in “Who is Who in American Art”, “WIKIPEDIA” and many magazines and newspapers and was shown on television shows in different European countries.. His sculpture “CLOWN” was exhibited in Russian State museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Four of his Art books are accepted to a Library of Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

VASILY KAFANOV

My work focuses on reconnecting time. Time is an illusory and shapeless substance. It is homogenous along its entire length, and we recognize each of its distinct ages by the objects it produces and leaves behind. Time is like a blank canvas on which each age leaves its own inimitable imprint, coloring it with its own recognizable objects. Our parents and grandparents, and generations that came before them, were all defined by the objects of their age. We see them in old photographs dressed in the fashion of the day, sitting next to their record players or driving their quaint motor cars.

The old photographs, the black-and-white images printed on cardboard from the century before last or the Polaroids from the 1970s, are also now a thing of the past – as are earlier oil portrait of men and women who came before them. It is the objects that pin us to the blank canvas of our time. I collect those objects, the images of the people they used to define and the ideas – in philosophy, technology, the arts – that gave rise to them, and put them in my work. I work in a variety of media.

I make paintings, collages, sculpture, drawings and ceramics. I scour flea markets looking for old object, for machines, mechanisms and devices of the past, whose purpose we no longer understand but that are ineluctably pinned to the age when they were created. They were once indispensable and useful, and they defined their time. I don’t try to restore or even understand them, but I find a new life for them in my work.

SVETLANA KOKSHAROVA

Svetlana was born in Novosibirsk , Russia. She studied the basics of drawing from early childhood, mostly with her father, the professional artist.

Svetlana graduated from the Novosibirsk Art College and later she graduated from the Novosibirsk Conservatory as a piano teacher.

While interested in various types of art, including music, sculpture, ceramics, restoration, art history and graphic design her main passion is oil painting.

In the later years she developed her unique style in landscape painting with the emphasis on emotional glorification and expression of tranquility and sublimity of Nature.

Most her paintings are in private collections in the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Israel, and Russia.

IRENE KOVAL

Irene Koval, Ukrainian artist originally from Odessa, was raised in a family of carnies (father was an engineer and performer for the circus and mother was a skilled acrobat) Irene worked in the circus as a child, performing acrobatic acts. Her childhood was as unusual as it was difficult, always moving to new places all over Russia as a part of the soviet circus lifestyle.

After graduating from circus institute and officially becoming a part of the soviet circus, Irene found herself greatly stimulated by her creativity. At this time, she was collecting a diversity of skill and technique from the various art classes she was attending in different parts of the Former Soviet Union as she was traveling all over the country with her circus.

Irene had a strong passion for the fine arts and theater. From 1983 to 1987 she attended the State Art Theatrical College in Odessa and became a property master puppeteer and art sculpture doll designer. After graduation, she was participating in numerous fine art exhibitions in Ukraine and Russia. In 1989 she fled the political oppression of her home country by immigrating to the United States and settling in New York to continue her pursuit of a career in art. In 1994 Irene graduated from Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) as a textile and surface designer. She worked for different design studios but her love of the fine arts and theater never died.

Irene has been painting, constructing Dolls, and even assembling jewelry all her life. Her style and technique has transformed over the years but Irene always finds that most of all, her art is influenced by her experience as a circus performer.

SASHA LEVIN

Since my young years I was lucky to been exposed to the world of art. I spent days observing and absorbing works of great masters of classical, impressionists and modern art. From as far I can remember reading, painting and sculpturing was my main past time.

In my current art work I’m in search of harmony of form and color and in the same time can invoke thoughts and emotions.

IGOR SATANOVSKY

Igor Satanovsky is a poet, translator, curator, visual artist, and award-winning book designer. He was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1969, moved to the U.S. in 1989, and received his BFA in art studio from Brooklyn College in 1994. His most recent exhibits included personal shows at Zverevskiy Center of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia, September 2019), and The Living Gallery Outpost (NYC, 2017). Among his curatorial/art management projects are Boris Lurie: American Nonconformist (The State Russian Museum, Stroganov Palace. St. Petersburg, Aug–Nov 2019) and Art Against Art: Yesterday and Today (a special project for the Fifth Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013).

We are back to Plato’s cave.

The world is reduced to shadows & lights dancing upon the walls.

The walls are real, they flicker, omnipresent.

They are the screens of our tablets, computers, and smart phones.

I’ve been drawing and scribbling on them with my fingers since 2012.

I feel both Paleolithic and contemporary.

I am a New Cave Artist.

I am the multitude, and we didn’t get here by chance.

Huge swathes of our cultural heritage are collapsing and disappearing.

We have lost and forgotten so much, but we are reminded by our losses and memories.

The walls are closing in on us, they are too close, we cannot see well.

It is all here, on these pages, including the shards of visual codes that survived, but became incomprehensible.

The puzzle’s changed rapidly, we had to keep up, yet the reflections rushed on.

The walls are getting smarter, they have begun to absorb us, perhaps one day we will merge.

Conceivably they will reflect us better than we have ever reflected on ourselves.

The following works are still a record of the human condition.

EMIL SILBERMAN

When I enter my studio, I enter a different world of subconscious feelings, new forms and emotions that cannot be expressed in any other way. Capturing this reality is my challenge as an artist.

I grew up in Latvia during the Soviet era. I always knew that I was born to be an artist but by a strange turn of fate, I also became a physician. I chose Emergency Medicine as my specialty and have been working in a busy inner city ER for many years. For a long time I kept the two worlds separated. Then one day I realized that I was streaming ideas from my medical work into my art and the two worlds started to came together. The drama and intensity of emotions in the ER are probably unmatched in any other work environment.

The medical literature reports that a large proportion of ED visits are behavioral and psychiatric in nature. Such patients are most interesting to an artist interested in exploring the human condition and psyche. The facial expressions and forms of the human body distorted by pain and disease provide me with an endless source of ideas and inspiration.

For many years I would not disclose my unique situation out of fear that it would distort the viewer’s perspective, but I now realize that it is hard to understand my art without it. On reflection I also see that my subject matter has shifted over the years from pain and death to satire, social commentary and other less light themes. I tend to use my art to express the many ironies of life.

My attitude may sometimes even be interpreted as facetious. I can use my artwork to make light of some very serious issues in society, as I see it today. This satirical style allows me to express my frustrations with society in a humorous manner.

VALERIA SOBOLEVSKAYA

“Valeria creates harmonious pictures with strong emotional self-expression of the author, whether it is rainy Saint Petersburg, autumn walkway, moonlit night of Theodosia. The view is originally born as something valuable and complete. In her works, we can see empathy of one state with all the components of natural unity, there is no separately grasped sky, a tattered existing strip of land. On the contrary, we see how the attackers are reported in a chain by all parts of the landscape and their moods.

The stroke of the brush is always significant as a manifestation of the author’s unique handwriting in this case, is a structural unit of the picture. Valeria writes marine with courageous free sweeping. In the pictures, complete silence can be traced, as well as transparency of the air, the smell of the sea, and amazing sunlight in favorite colors of famous marinist Aivazovsky.

In the expression of juicy greenery, the artist often reaches the limit of color intensity. Often, the color acquires density, becomes more temperamental, somewhere more blue, brownish, somewhere more romantic and fabulous. The thin elaboration of the details, the tip of the brush adds game, life, emotions to the works of Sobolevskaya. And here you are fascinated by its sincerity and extremely finished picture. Another very festive theme of Valeria’s art is the image of flowers, especially the joyful ones in our life, collected by the artist in lush bouquets, which she writes with the same light brushstroke that wilts.

In the paintings of Valeria there is always a mood illustrating the constant search for ways of self-expression. Portraits quite consciously repeating the stylistic techniques of the great masters.

However, it is impossible not to characterize the essence of the achievement of the success of Valeria Sobolevskaya. It is courage and caution, impulse and perseverance, tenderness and determination, certainty and hint, expressiveness and delicacy, those are definitions of any Fine Art.

Valeria Sobolevskaya considers herself a contemporary artist, which is true. Nowadays, a painter who likes to think and to reflect in colors maintains the priority of spirit over matter.

And so before us is a true servant of art, people and homeland. Please now see the pages of her life and make your own opinion.

The most amazing thing is that all are faces of the talented artist coexist in harmony. Valeria Sobolevskaya in a bright representative of the modern Moscow school of painting.”

Art critic, honored artist of Russia Vladimir Briginski