The exhibition is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of birth of the talented Leningrad painter, graphic artist and teacher Viktor Kuzmich Teterin (1922-1991), member of the Leningrad Branch of the RSFSR Artists’ Union and the Group of Eleven association.

Viktor Teterin’s work was fundamentally influenced by Alexander Osmerkin, an outstanding artist, professor of painting at Leningrad Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, a member of the “Jack of Diamonds” art group. It was he who taught the young artist that “the highest goal … both in drawing and painting is to convey the great form” and that color “serves only to reveal form and organize space.”

In search of his own style, Viktor Teterin tried his hand in different techniques and genres, creating landscapes, portraits, still lifes and genre compositions. Eventually, still life became the only genre close to his perception of the world, capable of expressing the artist’s vision and which has become a real creative laboratory of the language of painting.

Typical of Teterin’s art was the ability to see “the unadorned beauty” even in everyday life and to convey, through still life, his vision of the world and his subjective perception of the fragments of real life. At the same time, the artist had the “broad vision” learnt from Osmerkin. He included in his painting absolutely opposite feelings, severe and tender, ordinary and romantic, that constitute diversity of life.

In contrast to the technogenic and rationalistic practicalism, Teterin’s values were of emotional and spiritual nature. He accepted reality in all its complexity, which sounds unequivocally in his statement: “Through still life and landscape, more often without figures, I show an ordinary piece of life, as a rule, with simple objects, but they are — I would like to believe it! — poeticized by the presence of life around them, and this gives them meaning and justifies their existence”.