Arsen Baterbiev

Arsen Baterbiev was born in a small Cossack village in the Stavropol region of Russia in 1961.

After finishing secondary school, he enrolled to study sculpture in the Sukhumi Art School. In the mid-eighties, the artist moved to Petersburg. Baterbiev has been working as a graphic artist and painter and began making sculptures in the early nineties.

Our collection features a series of small format works established in oil on paper. They are located on the third floor of the Museum. In their essence, these works are reminiscent of grisaille, monochromatic paintings which imitate relief. This voluminous manner reveals the hand of a sculptor. It seems that the artist tries to mould a nude model on the surface of paper. The artist explains that he uses colour as a shape forming element in his artwork.

In the big format painting represented in our collection by the work, Vase, Baterbiev uses contrasting flat painting methods and doing so achieves the effect of monumentality. The artist’s brush stingily, but carefully, draws contours, and cautiously adds spots of a bright colour to a monochromatic color scale. The gigantic vase emerges as a night vision and becomes prominent in the dark.

Baterbiev’s painting is, first of all, a work on shape. Colour plays a secondary role to his forms. The emotional content and sensuality of Baterbiev’s works depend on an expressiveness of drawing, the expressiveness of a line. He tries to bring a drawing to a laconic sign, a formula which expresses the meaning of the subject.