The Mastery and Improvisations of Natalia Muradova

"Who does not try to drink the sea may die of thirst at the end of life.
The white sheet is not an empty space, it is a battlefield for the right to be, to feel, and to live."
Natalia Muradova, "Petals"

In 1994, amidst the chaos of the post-Perestroika era, Natalia Muradova was commissioned to create tapestries for the newly constructed Engineering Building of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The tapestries were to be displayed on three levels, so the unifying theme was born - "Three Centuries of Russian Culture". The first-floor tapestry depicted "The Park, 18th Century", the second floor featured "The Nobleman's Nest, 19th Century", and the third showcased "The Poet's Window, 20th Century". These works, a quarter-century later, remain fresh and contemporary, integral to the interior they were created to complement.

Textile design is a sphere both familiar and unknown. Familiar to artists and art scholars, but the overwhelming majority of us rarely pay close attention to fabrics. And there are not many artists whose works in the field of artistic textiles rise to the level of fine art. Natalia Muradova is one of them.

A People's Artist of the Russian Federation and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Muradova began her professional career in the 1960s in the textile industry, eventually turning her attention to theatrical curtains for stages across the country and, most successfully, to tapestries.

Undoubtedly, her crowning achievement was her participation in the reconstruction of the Russian President's residence in the Moscow Kremlin (1995). The enormous 50-meter tapestry "The Radiance of Moscow" was executed at the legendary Aubusson manufactory in France, and Muradova remains the only Russian artist to have had the opportunity to work with the unique specialists who have inherited the centuries-old tradition of weaving.

Parallel to this, Muradova was actively engaged in hand-painted silk, experiments with volumetric spatial compositions that gradually became more monumental, drawing on her experience in interior works. The palette of techniques and materials expanded, and she began to play with assemblage and textile art objects. Unexpected combinations of weaving with glass and foil, embroidery with photography and watercolor, canvas printing emerged, and even real objects were incorporated into the works, the meaning of whose presence was sometimes understood only by the author...

Muradova's free, questing creative spirit continues to develop actively today, as evidenced by the ever-new works born of the master's inspiration and her incredible work ethic. The artist herself characterizes her creativity as "an exciting and endless romance, platonic, intellectual and even sensual". At the heart of her work lies a synthesis and experiment with texture, color and volume. And a synthesis not only in the field of techniques, but also of meanings. The artist enthusiastically, with passion, solves both plastic and substantive tasks simultaneously.

In Muradova's work, epochs and cultural symbols of human civilization are easily combined, and the unbreakable connection of times is traced. Antiquity, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism and, of course, modernity - this is the environment in which the author lives and develops. She is equally close to the strict Antique architectural forms, the paintings of the Renaissance, and contemporary art. Each of Muradova's works is an independent story, sometimes very personal. Natalia Vladimirovna is a deep and versatile person, who loves fiction and poetry, and who herself wields the pen well, subtly understanding music. Therefore, her works are filled with personal philosophy. Each panel is a kind of manifesto of the artist's attitude to the surrounding life as an endless path that opens up ever new meanings, facets, perspectives - both of the long-gone and of the present, in a word, of all the beauty that was and is in the history of mankind, in the history of art and culture.

The synthesis underlying Natalia Muradova's art is not only plastic, textural, technological, which constitutes the visible side of her creativity. It is also a synthesis of different types of visual art: decorative, pictorial, photographic, collage, textile sculpture, as well as artistic words, for which the author feels reverence. It is also a synthesis of genres - the artist creates still lifes, landscapes, abstract works, portraits, interwoven with one another.

The artist claims that she has never consciously strived for the synthesis on the scale present in her work: "It all began during perestroika, when there were problems with materials. Scraps of paper, papier-mâché, some kind of bag... in principle, it didn't matter what... If you see an image before you, that is, you know what you want to get, then the means of achieving it can be very different. There were no fabrics, no paper, and no money to buy them, it affected everyone, as you remember..." It was then that the inclusions of fragments and details different from the nature of textiles - ceramic, glass and even metal - began to appear in the works. Then "gradually, a multilayered, vibrating surface, hand-stitched multiple times to give it some rigidity" appeared. The first such work, the wall panel "In the Remnants of Sleep the Reality Was Born" (1994), participated in the Łódź Triennial and found its permanent home in the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. Works like "You Can Live in an Imaginary World" (2000) and "The Novel Will Be Read" (2004) were executed in a similar technique.

Over time, fragments of her own earlier works began to be incorporated into the compositions, becoming connecting threads between the creations of different periods of life, and could even become the central theme of a new work. Natalia Muradova often works without a sketch. Already having an artistic concept, she does not imagine the final format of the work. In her interviews, she repeats that her things "grow". On the one hand, this is due to the size of the workshop, which is too small for such a master. On the other hand, it is a certain philosophy, consonant, for example, with Pavel Filonov, who believed that the organism of the painting should grow, as everything living in nature grows.

When does the author consider the work completed? First of all, the "wall" on which the process is taking place "ends"; the size of the wall is a physical limiter of growth. The work is created over about a year, and its form changes systematically. The main thing is to preserve the original concept.

Acquainted in the mid-1980s with the traditional American quilt, and especially with the crazy quilt, with many artists working in this technique, seeing the creations of authors who displayed unbridled imagination, went beyond the usual, abandoned templates, Muradova realized that this was what she was looking for. Rethinking the interesting technique, she transformed the orderly textile panel into an unexpected work of art, full of elegance and audacity. In parallel, the artist also attempted to destroy the familiar square and rectangular form, since the fabric allowed this to be done easily. Works of irregular, indefinite shape began to be born, which significantly expanded the boundaries of the artistic concept: "I don't want to limit my works to the right form, they are often cramped there," the master asserts. Thus, improvisation and creative energy, which have in no way diminished over the years, but on the contrary, have blossomed to the fullest, have taken possession of Natalia Muradova's work.

All this could be seen in full measure at the large-scale exhibition in nine halls of the Russian Academy of Arts in February 2018. Unfortunately, in modern architecture, there is almost no place for decorative art, and unique monumental textile works can only hope to be presented in a museum or exhibition space. Today, architecture essentially denies any addition, saturation. Man often even seeks empty space for the rest of his soul, unable to cope with the oversaturation of information and visual images. At the same time, Muradova's exhibitions always have many viewers.

A kind of manifesto of her work was the "Self-portrait" (2017). Considering textiles as a means of expressing her feelings - as "her own voice" - Natalia Muradova sets herself the most complex task: how to declare her devotion to art by means of decorative techniques. Her self-portrait precisely demonstrates the completely new possibilities of familiar materials. "Many say: fabric is everyday life. But to raise it above everyday life is already mastery," the artist is convinced, and creates her monumental self-portrait, complementing the painting and embroidery with her own photograph and poetic lines written on silk by Vladislav Khodasevich. Here one can see her personal preferences, interests and hobbies, the virtuosic combination of the incongruous, firmly binding her multifaceted creativity.

In principle, any of Muradova's things carries echoes of her biography and favorite techniques. Here is the work "Giselle" (2017). And immediately reminiscences of the Bolshoi Theatre ballets are born, the poetry of movement is felt in the watercolor, that is, a separate semantic moment arises, initially inspired only by a small beautiful piece of fabric - this is how this work was born. What happened next, the artist herself tells: "Then suddenly a square of solid-colored fabric catches your eye - you think, well, this is boring... And you want to try to enrich this square, use papier-mâché, for example... That's how the work begins to develop, gradually, 'growing' in meaning and size... There is definitely an element of play, fantasy, experiment here... And suddenly you see: 'It's connected! Interesting...' If something didn't like it, you cut it out, remove it, look - it's not bad anyway... add - remove, soften - emphasize..." Such is the laboratory of an artist who thinks simultaneously in the concepts of decorative art, watercolor painting, music, the poetics of the artistic word...

Her works often feature the theme of travel, which Muradova considers from a philosophical point of view: life as a great road and an exciting game. She is not an adherent of listing the places she visits, although she travels a lot around the world, while the echoes of the art of ancient Greece in her works are one of her favorite motifs. Tirelessly admiring this culture, the artist fills her works with ancient motifs. Here are the cannelures - both in the drawing and in the folds of the fabric, and the capitals, and the caryatids bearing the sea wave on their heads... The columns, which in ancient Greece "were one of the most archaic forms of embodiment of the deity, a means of fixing its presence in the world," created by the artist in the 21st century from textiles as a tribute to architecture, the most important of the arts, reflect the hidden need to be surrounded by such architecture. But these fragile columns play not only an aesthetic, but also a functional role - they create a contrast for the work located nearby, framing it like a kind of frame.

It is interesting to observe the author's attitude to her works, in which the notes of the artist-director, the artist-production designer, are heard. First of all, Natalia Vladimirovna believes that almost all of her works can be assembled into a certain unified composition. Secondly, she is ready to continue the transformation of any of them. She assumes that a textile panel can be laid on the floor, on the table, thrown over, used to upholster walls, furniture, etc. The second follows from the first, the level of synthesis in her works is so high that the variations here are endless. Against the background of any of them, you can hang a watercolor, or, conversely, surround the painting with a textile frame...

The "game" in Muradova's works did not begin yesterday. In the work "Treasures of the Past Times" (1998), the author also plays, only differently, creating objects of material culture in a material uncharacteristic of them. The mirror, the porcelain cup, the flowers here look like an attempt to create a new reality. Moreover, the artist's signature is on the front of the painting. This is not customary in the decorative arts, but the master decided to fix this still life as a painting work. And this makes an impression. At the same time, she did not leave her signature on many more significant things, in particular on the monumental tapestries in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Kremlin. It is to be hoped that this omission will be corrected in the very near future.

"I had an exhibition," the master recalls, "where one work was thrown over a frame in the center of the hall: in the Museum of Decorative Art, we could not use wooden wall panels. Then the designers made a structure from improvised materials - they connected a couple of tables, put a chair on them and draped the ready-made panel over this structure. It was very interesting, because it looked different from different sides. Just like a scarf that you can stretch on a frame and present as a panel. There is also a composition, and color, and even a plot, an idea. At the same time, you need to take into account whether it will look good in a costume and whether it will decorate a person. In general, any work of art works in different directions."

A distinctive feature of Muradova's temperament is never to stop at what has been achieved. To move forward in search of the new. At the same time, she does not leave her creative finds and successes behind, sooner or later she returns to them, develops them, re-checks them. At each of her exhibitions, the attention of the viewers is attracted by an unusual work - an imitation of a tapestry, in which the threads are replaced by thin cardboard strips with a pattern printed on canvas according to the artist's sketch. The artist's idea that cardboard, which is an intermediate stage between fibers and paper, can be presented in the form of a tapestry, is amazing in itself! And the principle of the tapestry in the work was observed, and the result turned out to be unusual, so the work received an award at the II Russian Triennial of Contemporary Tapestry in the nomination "Innovative Images, Materials, Technologies". "This work only gives new ideas," the artist believes, "and then everything needs to be developed. After all, the artist never rests."

In the case of Natalia Muradova, this is not an exaggeration. Today, when works of contemporary art are often created in a very short time, someone may find it incredible that a whole year of labor is devoted to a single creation. But such is the artistic nature of this master's creativity, which requires a complete, unconditional surrender of strength, time, and ingenuity, fantasy and emotions. Then amazing works are born, having no analogues in world art.

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