Joseph Brodsky's Venetian stanzas in engravings by Vladimir Nasedkin

AZ ART on Maroseyka presents Vladimir Nasedkin's project "Joseph Brodsky: Venetian Stanzas." The exhibition was first presented in 2011 as part of the 54th Venice Biennale at the Ca' Foscari Library. Alexander Ponomarev served as the curator of the Venice exhibition. In 2012, the same project was shown in Rome at the Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese. Curator — Alinda Sbragia. In winter 2023, the exhibition was held at the North Caucasus Branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (NCCA Vladikavkaz) and subsequently in Moscow.

On Catholic Christmas 1972, Brodsky first arrived in Venice — a city he would visit seventeen times during his lifetime and to which he dedicated sixteen poems.

Vladimir Nasedkin's series of engravings is a livre d'artiste: sixteen engraved illustrations executed by the artist in the xylography technique introduce the viewer to Joseph Brodsky's images of Venice. The poems and engravings are printed as spreads from specially made original wooden blocks (on boxwood) using the unique technique of wood engraving. This technique, rare in our time, originated in the mid-19th century, while woodcut engraving dates back to 15th-century Venice. The spreads are assembled into a single book block and accompanied by annotations in English and Italian. The poems are printed in Russian. The edition consists of fifty copies.

The AZ ART exhibition on Maroseyka presents an edition from Natalia Opaleva's collection.
AZ Museum has actively collaborated with the artist before — Vladimir Nasedkin's works were featured in the exhibition "And Who Are the Judges?", and with the Museum's support, the artist's large-scale art object "Drunken Fence" was realized at the Archstoyanie festival in 2021.

Natalia Opaleva, Director General of AZ Museum: "Vladimir Nasedkin is one of my favorite contemporary artists; his works have long been part of my collection. Working as both an artist and a sculptor, Vladimir continues the line of geometric abstraction that descends directly from both avant-gardes — the first and the second. He is a connecting thread between the rich and diverse legacy of the twentieth century and the new, still-forming art of the current century."

Vladimir Nasedkin, artist, author of the project: "My illustrations to Joseph Brodsky's poetry can only conditionally be called illustrations; rather, they are engravings on the theme of the Master's poetry, but they, I hope, embody the quintessence of the Poet's creative spirit, striving to comprehend the mystery of the infinite not through logic but through intuition.
I use the principle of understatement, incompleteness, and aesthetic suggestion to engage the viewer's perception and make it as individual and unique as the artistic process itself.
The seashore, a wave, a lagoon, a fragment of landscape — everything is subordinated to movement and light, where the silvery tone of the engraving is not simply a surface but Space. Space with its own laws, fields of tension, accents and peripheries, where voids and pauses carry the main rhythmic and emotional weight."

Andrei Tolstoy, art historian: "Joseph Brodsky is one of the most difficult authors for direct visual parallels; it is no wonder that most illustrations to his texts (perhaps with the exception of his own) cannot be considered convincing to any degree. But Nasedkin's works do not indulge in direct allusions. Simply in their bold silhouettes and contours, emphatically emerging from the silvery haze of the engraved sheets, there is the same sharpness and nakedness of vision as in the poet who once captured and firmly imprinted in words both 'the wet hitching post of the pier,' and 'the violin necks of the gondolas,' and 'the golden scales that surfaced in the canal of windows.'"