Before us is Krasnopevtsev. Fabulous beauty. Rare in plot, infrequent in color, large and expensive. The authenticity has already been confirmed by the main expert in Dmitry Krasnopevtsev’s art, Alexander Ushakov. He also told us the exact name of this work: “Two shells and beads”. This is the most valuable period of the master of metaphysical still life. An indisputable masterpiece.

Vasily Shulzhenko. A terrible picture. A mixture of itinerant movement with undiluted existential horror of the level of Edvard Munch and Alfred Kubin. There will certainly be something to think about and something to talk about. The picture is not only with a powerful subtext, but also a virtuoso technical performance. A real old school. Few artists paint like that today.

Works by the 1960s artist Boris Sveshnikov regularly participate in our auctions, but still recall the biography. At the age of 19, he was sent to a prison camp due to slander, for anti-Soviet activities. The “goner” dying of exhaustion was saved by the paramedic Arkady Akimovich Steinberg — the artist of the “Silver Age” and the father of Eduard Steinberg. Perhaps it was precisely that camp horror that gave rise to that very unique imagery in Sveshnikov's work — with monsters, graves, infernal figures. What is called “Kafkaesque romance”.

Belenok is a classic of disaster. Whirlwind. Panic realism. A lonely figure hiding behind a barrier. An anomaly hung in the air behind him. Anxious waiting for a denouement. The tension is growing and... This atmosphere is the main theme in the work of Petr Belenok. An artist of amazing fate. At the beginning of his creative career, he was a rather successful official sculptor in Ukraine. He made busts of Lenin for village councils. No end of work and endless stream of orders. Wealth in exchange for eternal provincialism. And he didn’t want to live like that. He preferred the freedom and independence of unofficial art instead of bureaucratic satiety. Who now remembers the sculptors of endless Lenin busts? But Belenok went down in history as one of the main artists of unofficial art.

Before us is not a picture, but the whole object of the master of melancholic realism, Yuri Kuper. The work is a virtuoso embodiment of the technique of sfumato, developed, as is believed, by Leonardo da Vinci. Sfumato is an Italian word for blurriness, nebula. The idea of the technique is to blur the outlines of nature in order to convey the air surrounding it.