The Chess by Olga Grechina (born 1947) is one of the gems of the Kurgan Regional Art Museum’s collection. The painting is unusual and attracts with the mysteriousness of images and, of course, its technique. Olga Grechina is a graphic artist and a painter, the honoured artist of Russia. She graduated from The Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and started her creative career as a talented graphic artist. Throughout a long period of time the painter did etching, calligraphy, and silk screen printing. Grechina liked the style of the OST (The Society of Easel Artists), the art collective of the 1920s, which broadly used the montage composition in painting. The technique of collage and montage, overlapping textures and forms of objects upon one another is a distinctive feature of her art. The artist creates many works on modern subjects and in such a way synthetizes the actuality of subjects with new technical means of depiction.
One of the artist’s repeating plots is the beach vacation: Breakfast at the Sea, Striped Swimsuit, Swimmer on the Stripped Towel, and others. While working on the Chess painting, Olga Grechina also referred to her observations at the beach. The accidental look at the beach objects generates the unexpected associations with the crooked intestines of some mechanisms or chess figures put one upon another. Blue and red stripes are flat and decorative or, otherwise, like in Chess, three dimensional and compared to either exposed blood vessels, or to the wires of the detonating device, or to the coiling tubes of the technical machines. They frequently appear in Olga Grechina’s compositions. At the same time the painting’s colour palette refers to the images of the artist’s beloved OST, for example, to the Yury Pimenov’s works with their cinnabar, inky and eggshell colours.
Olga Grechina’s art is filled with understatement and intrigue. In the creative space of her works she likes to combine seemingly incongruous events and things in order to create a certain labyrinth of senses for the viewer. For instance, the Chess metaphorically shows our contemporaries’ world perception and evokes the disturbing associations depending on the experience and fertility of imagination.
One of the artist’s repeating plots is the beach vacation: Breakfast at the Sea, Striped Swimsuit, Swimmer on the Stripped Towel, and others. While working on the Chess painting, Olga Grechina also referred to her observations at the beach. The accidental look at the beach objects generates the unexpected associations with the crooked intestines of some mechanisms or chess figures put one upon another. Blue and red stripes are flat and decorative or, otherwise, like in Chess, three dimensional and compared to either exposed blood vessels, or to the wires of the detonating device, or to the coiling tubes of the technical machines. They frequently appear in Olga Grechina’s compositions. At the same time the painting’s colour palette refers to the images of the artist’s beloved OST, for example, to the Yury Pimenov’s works with their cinnabar, inky and eggshell colours.
Olga Grechina’s art is filled with understatement and intrigue. In the creative space of her works she likes to combine seemingly incongruous events and things in order to create a certain labyrinth of senses for the viewer. For instance, the Chess metaphorically shows our contemporaries’ world perception and evokes the disturbing associations depending on the experience and fertility of imagination.
