Michael Roginsky. Painting 1996–2003 from Private Collections

Roginskii Mikhail is one of the founders of the modern national art language, with its laconic brevity of means, conceptual distinctness, and inner expression. Though little approved of in the 1960s, Roginsky became one of the most significant masters of Moscow art scene. Denying the Moscow art tradition, which demands of its followers not only sense but spiritual qualities as well, Roginsky reopens the very essence of painting — he creates genre painting, sometimes filled with deep existential emotions, with all his wisdom gained with the life experience. More than a quarter of a century Roginsky left to Paris. However, it was then that he began to create probably the most trustworthy, though not the most complimentary, portrait of Moscow of all made in the last 50 years. His works take us back to the “ideal times” of the 1960s. They show people with half-erased faces and subtly changed proportions, who are both a bit clumsy and stand firmly on the ground. Mikhail Roginsky’s paintings are nostalgic and at the same time make one ponder over the history of the humankind, rather than the history of art.