The year 2024 marks the 85th anniversary of the birth of the remarkable Petersburg artist Korinna Germanovna Pretro. In 1965, she graduated from the Repin Institute of Arts, and since then her vocation has been graphic art, including book illustration, and her favourite techniques are pastel, watercolour and drypoint. Korinna Pretro's art seems to have absorbed all the main artistic endeavours of the 1970s Leningrad graphic arts. Contrary to popular belief that this decade was a time of stagnation, the oeuvre of the Leningrad artists shows a rise in vividness, the emergence of new views on the ways of revealing the plot basis of works. It is metaphorical and clear from the plasticity point. Korinna Pretro became one of the leading artists who defined a fresh, lively wave in the graphic art of those years, to which she remained faithful for many years. Following the ‘spirit of the seventies’, she designed around forty books, made a few poetic, imbued with tranquillity landscapes and ‘quiet’ genre sketches. They reflected the deep meaning of everyday life, the value of life as such. Graphic artists, if it were not about propaganda forms, never aspired to pathos. And the work of Korinna Pretro confirms this. There is no fanfare or poignant moments in her drawings, they are independent, in the broad sense of the word, and alien to the straightforwardness of socialist realism. For her, the human being is important as a self–valuable individual, and each character in her compositions seems to be in some natural, logical relationship with reality.
The Light Breathing exhibition, dedicated to the work of Korinna Pretro, presents luscious pastels and watercolours, sometimes enhanced with ink, landscapes and compositions themed on rural life, in which a human being merges with the natural environment and becomes part of the indivisible world, filled with peace and special non–bustling truth of existence. Korinna Pretro's drawings are a kind of metaphor of freedom. Inspired by the expanses of her favourite Pskov region with its hills and fields stretching to the horizon, they are characterised by the breadth of coverage and the feeling of infinity of space. In them, the artist finds true harmony. The same harmony fills Korinna Pretro's marvellous still lifes with their serene beauty. It is also present in her touching, very human drawings on religious subjects. But what makes her works especially appealing is her amazing ability to paradoxically combine brightness of colour with the peaceful precision of compositional solutions.
Visitor will see over 30 works from the artist’s studio and the Museum of 20th–21st Century Art of St Petersburg collection.
