ExhibitionsSergey Chubirko – Silent Presence

Personal exhibit of Sergey Chubirko
«Silent Presence»
(paintings, drawings, etchings)

Fondazione «Il Bisonte», Firenze, Italy
(17 – 31 January 2020)

Sergey Chubirko, graphic artist and painter, was born in Ukraine in 1969 and was trained in Russia, at the Ilya Repin Institute of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, where he distinguished himself particularly in drawing. He currently lives and works in Italy. Here, among the most important works, he made a series of portraits of the clergy of Vatican City, including the portrait of Pope Benedict XVI. Not surprisingly, in the personal and professional life of the artist, Ukraine, Russia and Italy are deeply linked as a source of inspiration and constant artistic reflection on man, life and time.

Sergey Chubirko’s exhibition in the gallery of the “Il Bisonte” Foundation is going to be at the very first days of the 2020 and will be a summary for the artist who, in December 2019, turned 50 years old. The exhibition will present over 20 graphic works, including etchings, and some pictorial works on large format canvas.

Drawing on his artistic experience, Sergey Chubirko, who is famous in Florence as a teacher of the Russian academic school of drawing, confirms his preference for three materials, fundamental in his work: sepia, sanguine and graphite. Most of the works that will be presented at the exhibition are in fact made of graphite. The thin pencil stroke, which thickens progressively, creates infinitely different volumes, textures and shades of gray. Even in his pictorial works, the interpretation of color is graphic. The range of colors that the master uses to maximize the definition of shapes and plasticity of the human body is kept and limited and the expression of the compositional scheme is intense.

The artist works in figurative style, preferring genre painting. His works, both graphic and pictorial, are inhabited by figures that will remain in the memory of the public for a long time. Here men, animals and trees are carved from a single material. The place where the works are set is undefined, space and time become relative categories. Instead, there is an impression of thematic continuity, as if the many characters traveled from one work to another and the story of their lives was intertwined in a single long story.

Sergey Chubirko’s art is mainly directed towards biblical themes and traditional motifs – such as, which he reinterprets and proposes with great originality and in his own way. For him, the artistic legacy of the past is not only a point of reflection, but a living foundation of his own coordinate system. These coordinates, both aesthetically and technically, have always been the work of Pieter Breugel and Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Del Sarto and Pontormo for Sergey Chubirko; finally the masters of Soviet realism Aleksandr Deineka and Gelij Koržev.

The exhibition is called “The Silent Presence” for one reason. Because the most precious thing for the characters of Chubirko’s works is the ability to listen to silence in an ever changing world and to keep it inside. There is silence, according to the artist’s thought, which is a starting point, the divine principle, from which everything that exists is born. Josè Ortega y Gasset called God a huge void that shines through everything and the reason why we are always alone in the world. This divine void, like a special tangible substance, is poured into every work of Chubirko. The void not as absence, but as ideal filling.

Sergey Chubirko’s personal exhibition “The Silent Presence” will be held in the halls of the galleries of the “Il Bisonte” Foundation – Florence, Italy – from 17 January to 8 February 2020.