The cultural heritage of the Russian North in the aesthetics of contemporary art

Although the homeland of Yuri and Evgenia Bezobrazov's works is the Russian North — a harsh but incredibly beautiful land — they win you over with their warmth and cosiness; you want to live alongside them, keep them close and enjoy the very fact of owning them.

The wooden horse and cockerel bring back childhood, while the anthropomorphic images of panka dolls take us back to the cult of ancestors, to the protective meaning of this authentic toy.

They play on some inner strings of the soul and warm the heart.

For me, the art of Yuri and Evgenia Bezobrazov is a reflection on the evolution of the human being and of the family line.

At first glance their works seem as traditional and ethnographically authentic as can be. And they are. Yet you always feel that this is a work of art by a person of today — a message to us, living in the 21st century, a reflection, a search, a conversation about what matters.

Their wooden horses, angels and people evoke sincere love and response — not as souvenirs from the past, but as a message from the present, written in the living language of tradition.

Simple forms about very complex, pressing things.

That is why they are so piercing, that is why you want to take them with you into the future.

Once I walked into the Museum of Moscow — an “exhibition of the achievements of the vintage economy with splashes of contemporary art” was on there.

It was by those splashes that I got stuck. The wooden sculptures of the large and immensely talented Bezobrazov family delighted me so much that I left with three horses, a rider, a granny, a grandpa and a dog. I even begged a knitted hat as a present.

Where the hat is, I honestly don't know, but the three horses, the rider, the granny, the grandpa and the dog I admire every day. They stand in the cupboard. In the most visible place.

And I dare say that I left the Museum of Moscow not only with three horses, a rider, a granny, a grandpa and a dog, but also with a new, wonderful friendship.

In the work of Yura and Evgenia Bezobrazov's workshop I see constant, dynamic growth — from pieces made within the tradition to works of their own that become true works of art.

Today national culture is being revived, and this workshop can rightly be considered one of the best in the country at the moment, representing the most interesting region of all, and the richest in craft — the Russian North.

The workshop's emphatically academic and at the same time conceptual approach to the search for form, colour and image makes a whole, organic statement.

This is exactly what a living school of objects and Russian design can be today — design firmly rooted in tradition, interpreting the present with irony and looking into tomorrow.

The history of the Russian North is forever bound up with wood.

Boundless forests gave everything that was needed: houses, boats, fuel, tools for work and daily life, food, clothing.

And all of it, as always in a traditional culture, turned into art — the architecture of villages and monasteries, of huts and churches, of bridges; the design of furniture and tableware, the tools of carpenters and weavers, children's toys; a synthesis of calculation and aesthetics, of symbolism and convenience; the unity of forest and craft, of faith and everyday life.

Think of the horse, which not only hauled logs from the forest and carried warriors into battle, and, with a painted shaft bow and ribbons, newlyweds from the church, but was also a children's toy, on wheels or without, guarded the world tree on an embroidered towel, carried Saint George on an icon and crowned the roof of a house.

And when a horse-head ridge beam became impossible on a five-storey block of silicate brick, and towels came to be sewn rather than embroidered, the little horse still remains a children's toy and part of the icon on the coat of arms, while the figure of a horse simply turns into an object of art.

And if Yuri and Evgenia Bezobrazov's panka doll keeps the same form as the one kept in a museum for a hundred years, changing its image only in our minds, then the moss grandfather they carved seems a stern keeper of old times, the three horses — red, blue and white — are not just the colours of the Russian flag but its bond with an ancient tradition, and split logs in the artists' hands have turned into flying angels.