No. 6. From the "House for sale" project

The graphic sheets of an unusually large format are devoted to the strange situations and mysterious situations of one couple in a confined space at home.

The naked body in these works cannot be confused with any other — it is a modern body that exists outside the classical laws of beauty, preserves the muscle memory of the repressive experience of the 20th century, and is devoid of social masks. For the first time, a modern body appears in Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon — one realistically showed male and female figures in all unsightly details, the other with cinematic expression depicted the rapid movement of a character inside a cube drawn on a plane. But in search of the closest analogues to these drawings, it is worth mentioning two very different Americans who are classics of figurative painting — Philip Perlstein and Eric Fischl. As in Perlstein's paintings, executed in a dry graphic manner, the works of Gretsky and Katz depict the semi-buddhist existence of heroes who have no one to be shy about.

The drawings in the House for Sale series have a completely different intonation — now the artists do not paint, but document. Black-and-white graphics turn out to be much more accurate when capturing complex and intense emotional states, and there is no redundancy in the dramatic art of picturesque interiors from previous works in the Living Space cycle. Artists who deal with a sheet of paper and have taken only a large format from the past leave the viewer alone with graphic matter. The nude figures in the works are almost close to the actual size, we have a monumentalized form in front of us. At the same time, it is a well-known nude production from the years of study at the Academy of Fine Arts, when the student is obliged to show mastery of the craft. Obviously, photos taken by artists were used for the compositions, but monochrome drawing used as a media reduces expressive techniques.

The technique of execution is very suitable for the plots: it seems to manifest the monotony with which the artist covers the sheet with hatching. Overflowing the surface of the graphic sheet, the strokes transform from a technical device into the meaning and content of the work. The authors make the characters' despondency and boredom palpable, which remains unchanged in all their exhausting activities, whether on an exercise bike, in the bathroom, in the hallway, in the bedroom, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the boiler room, in the attic, or even in the artist's studio... Gretsky and Katz listed all the places.

Pavel Gerasimenko