IGOR MAKAREVICH

What the critics say - It should be admitted that any general monographic text about a living artist inevitably looks somewhat like an obituary, the only difference, as a matter of fact, being in its date, the inconclusiveness of its logical sequences, and - at best - a weaker claim to objectivity. But though speech articulations desacralize the existential levels of creativity formalizing and packaging the more external manifestations of the author, they are still not without their magic consequences. Thus, the knowledgeable reader will have heard that the first "tombstone" for Igor Makarevich was "inscribed" by A.Monastyrsky, "Thematically nearly all the works presented fall into the same category. In various ways and materials the artist renders the attributes of death "in this world": tombstones, coffins, post-mortem surgical instruments, etc.". The list could be supplemented from all the subsequent works by Igor Makarevich, the said attributes being his unmistakable hallmark, a distinctive feature to identify his authorship. The theme of death is so habitual with him that it takes all shock out of its treatment which is too overt to catch the eye and articulated too unproblematically (a device favoured by the artists of the Collective Action circle) to be labelled either necrophobia or necrophilia. The author’s initial existential feeling towards it appears to have been stifled at the outset and substituted with a sum of artistic manipulations, professional skill, the craft... As an artist, Igor Makarevich is known for that high professional level, perfection of form, the special "finish" and "completeness" of work, an eye for details, an appeal to traditional esthetic codes, the magnificent command of various techniques, be it book illustrations (to Kafka, Thackeray), or photography, or monumental projects, or designs for exhibition space (it was he who created the distinctive style of the Avantgarde Club exhibitions)... Such universality is uncommon, it will not let us brush off the naive, but rather tempting (by the logic of culturology) notion of Makarevich running a kind of undertaker’s, with the consequent interpretation of his semantic space. His esthetically autonomous sculptural objects of various dates form a whole self-contained logical system which has not undergone a noticeable mental evolution, but used a wide choice of expressive means accessible to its external forms. He began with himself by registering his own "dematerialization" (in his life-time) through the artistic gesture of casting his plaster mask in the work entitled "The Changes". That was followed by "25 Memories of my Friend", "The Dispersal of the Ascending Soul" and other objects of the 1970s in which Makarevich enlarged the space of the traditional modernist gesture: from the dactyloscopic prints of his "Itinerant Gallery of Russian Art" (1981) to the obituary-smacking "Stationary Gallery" containing the portraits of three "good" artists - I.Chuykov, I.Kabakov, E.Bulatov (remember that "a good artist is a dead artist"), and on to a burial of all pre-modernist culture and civilisation in his "Reincarnation of St.Ignatius’ Relics" (1991).

T.Salzirn