Hamid Savkuev

From July 6, 2009 to September 6, 2009 the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow held “The New Ark” addressing the St.-Petersburg Art School - an exhibition of the St.-Petersburg based Kazakhstani-born artist Hamid Savkuev. It was organized as a presentation of more than 100 works, including paintings, schulpture and several graphic works, introducing the artist to the Moscow audience.

To express his complex worldview Hamid Savkuev organically combines classical European forms with the images of people and landscape views of Kabardino-Balkaria, revealing what might be universal questions and actuality.  

Figures of cosmic sence are berooted  in the mode of life of the Cherkes people, taking a viewer away from the modern flash-speed life closer to what is apprehended as partiarchal, outmoded, archaic, but alive and organic in the small mountain vilages in Kabardino-Balkaria, where time stops and this measured cycle puts everithing into the course.  

A child is given birth in pain, a bread is farmed hardscrabble – a man comes into the being and returns to the earth. His works are manifestations of what is timeless - Love, War, Labour, Birth, Game, Youth and Old age, End.  Every subject, chosen by the artist, gains the power of ancient myth or Bible story, narrated in the language of epics or proverbs, been shaped in striking plastic images, involute composition, short-spoken laconic colours and original pictoral texture.  

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Thus, like the Biblical Ark this New Ark is given to keep what is important not for these people, but for all of us.

The exhibition was made possible by the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, Research Museum of the St.- Petersburg Academy of Arts and the Mardjani Foundation.