Triangle Gallery is pleased to present Hello Makar!, a new solo exhibition of paintings by Krasil Makar.

Krasil Makar is an alias for a Yekaterinburg-based artist (b.1989) who works with painting, sculpture, and street art. According to biographic legend the artist Krasil Makar was born in 1889 in the village of Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha, Sverdlovsk Region. Until July 31 2021.
The artistic tradition to which Krasil Makar appeals today has broad boundaries, ranging from Old Believer iconography to Modernist painting.
In Krasil Makar's works, we find evidence of free experimentation with individual forms and elements of the expressive language of folk house painting. The picturesque luminosity effect connects the modern painter with the practices of Olga Rozanova and Mark Rothko. The dynamic and free-floating nature of his work aligns him with the works of Kandinsky and Malevich. The asceticism of Juan Miró, the musicality of František Kupka and Robert Delaunay also turn out to be close to the easel pieces by Krasil Makar.
The experience of turning to the practices of traditional folk art, typical of European modernism and the Russian avant-garde, is developed further in Krasil Makar's works. A rebirth of tradition is taking place at a new level and in contemporary circumstances.
In Krasil Makar's works, space and time lose their clear reference points. Self-historicization becomes a persistent motif and starting point in his work. This artist's biography is deliberately filled with paradoxical information, knowingly confusing the recent past and the unfathomable future. The authenticity and synonymity of the present day are naturally beginning to be questioned. The author prefers to comment on this "play with history" through the image of a half-forgotten journey: "We leave the places of our past and travel along uncharted roads to our future".

Hello Makar!
You are inside beauty, inside experience, and whether the past can be part of the present is something that opposes death and oblivion.
One hundred and fifty years ago, villagers in the Urals began hiring skilled painters to paint flowers and bouquets on their houses. The Ural house pictorial art was characterised by two-colour brushstrokes and a picturesque programme - each element of the house had its own floral motif.
When the old peasant way of life was destroyed in the 20th century, house murals became a museum tradition. Something rarely seen in the home and is associated with modernity.
But before that, avant-garde artists were inspired by peasant art - and created a language of new painting by embracing the forms, colours and techniques of traditional craftsmanship. However, avant-garde painting today is as much a legacy as house murals.The paintings in the exhibition are signed "Painted by Makar" and were created in 2021. They can be seen as beautiful landscapes of imaginary, dreamlike places, with berries scattered across the sky like stars and grasses bending like bridges over streams and seas. These landscapes are kind to you as a humble observer of the abundance and beauty ofnatural forms. At the same time, these paintings may seem like the spaces from a computer game or remind you of modernist paintings from a century ago.
Painted today, they show the connections between peasant craftsmanship, modernist painting, contemporary visual culture and the human desire, whether artist or observer, to discover the roots and possibilities of modernity in history.
We live our own lives in our current present, constantly dealing with loss. So many things are left behind, disappear, are discarded and forgotten. Makar, remembering the painting techniques from a bygone world, shows that that language can be the language of the modern home and modern beauty. The new fruit of a firmly rooted tree. A voice in which those living today discover their connection to history.

Marina Sokolovskaya