On June 24, the State Museum of the East, together with the Oready Gallery, with the participation of the artist's family and private collectors, present the exhibition "Washing Rust from the Eyes", dedicated to the centenary of the birth of the painter and graphic artist Jacques Ihmalian (1922-1978). The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by the master. A significant part of them will be shown for the first time.

The title of the exhibition was a slightly modified line from a poem by the artist himself, who believed that art can change a lot in a person.

Jacques Ihmalian was born in Istanbul, where he learned the skills of fine art: first under the guidance of Abidin Dino, a world-famous painter, and later showed his brilliant abilities in the class of Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. However, for his political activities he was arrested and, after spending three years in prison, emigrated. He lived in Syria, Lebanon, Poland, and China.

Since 1961, Ikhmalyan settled in Moscow, combining teaching Turkish language and literature at the Institute of Oriental Languages ​​at Moscow State University with intensive studies in fine art. It was as if he was trying to make up for what he had not managed to do in the previous decades.

Landscapes, genre scenes, faces, interiors, once seen by the artist and now painted from memory, retain a sense of the diversity and complexity of nature. Ikhmalyan believed that “art is such an approximation to the truth that it is sometimes even stronger than the truth itself. Stronger, because it is detached from trifles, more holistic, more filled with feeling and experience” and moved away from direct lifelikeness, striving for musical consonances of color and form, for metaphorical images, for an unpredictable and dramatic struggle between darkness and light, which in his works is also color.

In his works, one can find echoes of both French and Far Eastern artistic traditions, but the main thing in the formation of his art was undoubtedly the culture of his homeland.

This was repeatedly noted by his friends, outstanding representatives of the Turkish intelligentsia, in particular, the poet Nazim Hikmet, well known to the Russian reader. The artist had a long-standing close friendship with the latter. Jacques Ikhmalian's works are in the collections of the State Museum of the East, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of Painting and Architecture in Istanbul, the National Gallery of Armenia and other museums, and his exhibitions were held both in Russia and Turkey.


Exhibition curators: Svetlana Khromchenko, Liliya Slavinskaya
Accreditation: Natalia Borisova, +7 495-690-05-23, press@orientmuseum.ru