“Light. Colour. Harmony” by Amir Timergaleev

The Hermitage-Kazan Center, Kazan,  September, 10 2008 – October, 31 2008

The exhibition featured more than 70 works, including paintings and sketches, by Amir Timergaleev, a Kazan-born Moscow-based artist of the late 20th generation, known as “free figurativeness”.

Timergaleev is a citizen of the world, who travels in space freely and feels equally natural among the hustle and bustle of Moscow as well as beautiful sites of Venice, Paris, London and Santiago. 

Amir’s aesthetics and artistic flair belong to the realm of classical patters of the avant-garde culture, from which he took  complex intellectual structures and lucidity of the compositional vision, figurative canonicity and deep ingenuous power.

Going through the history of the world culture very intimately, he regains almost lost connection between the art trends of the beginnings of the 20th century and that of 1990s. The universal nature of this reality and its transpersonal values doesn’t prevent the artist from remaining true to his independent original approach to world culture, particularly to the art of Post-impressionism.  

Amir Timergaleev has been recognized as a true follower and true heir to ideas shared by Henri Matisse and Amadeo Modigliani, Paul Cezanne and Mark Chagall, while at the same time never hesitating to question authority of these iconic figures, these spiritual leaders of the newest art systems.

Kazan is a birthplace of the artist, a place of primary making up of his personal and professional personality. A multiethnic city, it didn't lose its uniqueness even in the Soviet period. No efforts could smooth over the particulars of local life, being almost genetically imprinted and defined by the coexistence of the Christian and Muslim cultures in the very heart of Russia. Though Timergaleev doesn't position himself as an ethnic artist, nevertheless, his very phenomenon makes it possible to meditate upon the trends of the professional Tatar art.  

The exhibition was organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan and the State Historical and Architectural Complex of Kazan Kremlin in cooperation with the Hermitage Kazan Exhibition Center and the Mardjani Foundation.