Lot 346: Oleg Tistol

Lamp
Signed in Cyrillic and dated 'O.Tistol 2010' lower edge. Signed in Cyrillic and English, titled and dated in Cyrillic 'Oleg Tistol 2010 lamp' on the reverse.

200 x 140 cm (78 3/4 x 55 1/8 in).

Acrylic on canvas.

2010

Art-Agent Ukr Gallery, Kiev

"Tistol’s latest project “UBK” (the abbreviation for “Southern Coast of Crimea”), on which he had been working since 2006, features a new stereotype as well. Tistol says: “Palm trees for me, just as for all other people, are the symbols of paradise. Moreover, in our tradition, the fir tree is a substitute for the palm. Therefore, I always perceived the palm as our ‘national tree’. One can also add here the summer, the Yalta seafront, and the holiday-like feeling of light-heartedness…”  In contrast to his earlier works, here the irony changes into gentle humour, the grotesque - into lyricism, and the depicted object’s interpretation – into rather exquisite aestheticism. In this series, one can find neither complex design nor intricate historical-cultural reflections nor that collision of meanings, images, and spaces that were characteristic of his earlier works. Here, the artist comes to the peculiar “trivialization of the exotic” and poeticizing of the everyday life, where the banal turns into the festive and the unusual... It is not accidental that the project includes several series of prints made against the background of the pages from school notebooks. In his “Palms”, Tistol again enters the territory of pop art surprisingly demonstrating the closeness of contemporary perception to “the acceptance of life in all its fullness” formulated by Tom Wesselmann in the 60-ies. However, the impossibility for the artist to transcend stereotypes in the media epoch enables him/her to create new works through their mutual collision in artistic context and through their assumption of unexpected meanings."
G. Sklyarenko from "Oleg Tistol's "Khudfond": Something About the Beauty of Stereotype" (Khudfond, Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2009)