“Inna Olevskaya’s Porcelain Sculpture” is a new permanent display in the General Staff building. The State Hermitage is presenting an exposition devoted to contemporary porcelain. The first phase is the display of new acquisitions made by the Hermitage – compositions created by the recently deceased Inna Olevskaya (1940–2021).
The State Hermitage has created the display with the support of Gazprom and with the participation of the Imperial Porcelain Factory joint-stock company.
Inna Solomonovna Olevskaya is one of this country’s most outstanding contemporary artists working in porcelain, an Honoured Artist of Russia and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts. She worked for more than 50 years at the Imperial Porcelain Factory (known until 2005 as the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory). Today her creations can be found in the collections of the State Hermitage and other Russian museums, as well as private hands all around the world. Inna Olevskaya’s works have repeatedly featured in exhibitions devoted to porcelain art. In 2017 she was accorded her own personal exhibition in the halls of the Hermitage.
An artistic experimenter selflessly devoted to her work, with a colossal store of creative energy, Inna Olevskaya came up with some absolutely inimitable approaches in porcelain. Fantastically interwoven in her oeuvre are lyrical images from the Silver Age poetry of which she was so fond and literature from around the turn of the 21st century, religious motifs and elements of contemporary art and design.
The new display in the State Hermitage provides the broad public with a unique opportunity to get acquainted with the creations of one of the most talented artists of the 20th–21st centuries, as a result of which a new style made its appearance in present-day porcelain – the exceptional and instantly recognizable style of Inna Olevskaya.
On show in one of the halls of the General Staff building are three compositions Genius and Villainy – Two Incompatible Things (1990–99), Journey into the Past (2012) and JACO PASTORIUS (2021) that are especially noteworthy within Inna Olevskaya’s creative legacy. These are magnificent multi-figure art objects representing a symbiosis of painting and sculpture, their creator’s boldest design projects.
The chief focus of attention in the display is the architectural-spatial composition Genius and Villainy – Two Incompatible Things. This is an entire porcelain ensemble, tending towards the monumentality of the “grand style”. It was Inna Olevskaya’s enduring dream that this particular work would end up in the Hermitage.
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The composition Genius and Villainy – Two Incompatible Things, which occupies the central place in the display, is among the artist’s key creations. It is made up of 11 sculptures. The figurative meaning of the work, in which we encounter Mozart and Salieri, Pushkin and his opponent in the fateful duel D’Anthès, a muse and winged angels, is revealed through the contrast between the frozen “faceted” faces of the people and the spiritual countenances of the angels. The central figure in the composition – that of the muse, which Olevskaya particularly singles out – was completed first in the almost decade-long process of producing this porcelain ensemble. In Inna Olevskaya’s poetic interpretation, Pushkin appears before the viewer in symbolic flight; he seems to be in a state of weightlessness, as if at this very moment his spirit is soaring above the world. Next to him is the inclined figure of D’Anthès. His right hand reaches out, as if begging for forgiveness. The other hand covers his face, but the horror that has overcome the duellist is not concealed from the viewer. Olevskaya made his image with the exaggeration of a caricature; she produces a sort of grotesque picture. No less fascinating is Inna Olevskaya’s treatment in Genius and Villainy of the conflict in Pushkin’s tragedy Mozart and Salieri.
The sculpture Journey into the Past presents a boatman with silvered oars rowing against the current beneath a symbolic bridge. The work is marked out by a particular stylization, which, woven from figurative moulding and philosophical reflection, conveys the beauty and originality of its creator’s artistic manner. The images and motifs that arise in the imagination: the smooth surface of the water, the expanses of the heavens and the bridge point to the healing power of nature, which preserves secret knowledge of a person, their life and immortality. Following the boatman protagonist, the viewer plies a course through the artistic analogue of reality into another, supernatural, realm. Henceforth the “journey” seems to be not movement from one point to another, but immersion within oneself, “time” and “space”. Inna Olevskaya always stressed that the boatsman must remain unpainted. The white hue of the porcelain is described as “colourless”, which points to the indefiniteness, liminal and unstable state of the figure. His world is shaded in a monochrome palette, while above him we seem to sense the insipid grey of the Petersburg firmament.
The composition JACO PASTORIUS was completed just a few weeks before Inna Olevska passed away. The artist created a truly unforgettable image in porcelain. This work is dedicated to a talented musician, bass guitarist and composer – Jaco Pastorius (1951–1987), whose gifts Olevskaya greatly admired. We find ourselves faced here with a complex, contradictory psychological image. The artistic treatment of the musician’s costume is interesting; on his jacket the notes of musical improvisations that he wrote alternate with the titles of his works. The depiction of Pastorius’s hands deserves particular attention. The sculptor perfectly conveys their movement, which seems to be frozen in porcelain only for an instant.
The display has been prepared by the State Hermitage’s Department of the History of Russian Culture (headed by Viacheslav Anatolyevich Feodorov). The curator is Yekaterina Sergeyevna Khmelnitskaya, Doctor of Art Studies, a senior researcher in the department, keeper of the collection of 19th–21st-century Russian porcelain and ceramics.
The display is accompanied by a scholarly publication Farforovaia plastika Inny Olevskoi (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2023), devoted to the history and analysis of the works on show in the hall. The author is Yekaterina Khmelnitskaya.
A film has also been produced to go with the display.
