On April 17, 2024, the exhibition of landscape paintings by self-taught artist and resident of the Timiryazevsky district Mikhail Rybakov, titled "Two Suns, Three Moons," will open at the Park of Unity Gallery "Exhibition Halls of Moscow."
The pastoral motif, which endows the landscape with subjective perception, psychological depth, and a specific viewpoint from which nature is seen through an existential lens, traces back to the tradition of the Peredvizhniki school. In Russian painting of the second half of the 19th century, landscape became an expression of the author's philosophy and a sum of value systems, often seeking answers to pressing questions through depictions of nature. As a self-taught and intuitive artist, Mikhail Rybakov (born 1984) has created several dozen paintings devoted to the theme of contemplating sunsets and the rising of the moon and sun. Inspired by the works of Alexei Savrasov, Isaac Levitan, and Alexei Gritsai, Rybakov focused on a found motif that captures the same image at different times of day with varying color shades. Levitan’s sensibility borders in the artist’s work on magical realism, the ambivalence of seasons and times of day, and at the same time, timelessness. Rybakov’s cycles reveal to the viewer a non-academic focus of pictorial exploration of illusion, evanescence, and the elusive nature of time.