Rodina - Contemporary painters from the West winter in Russia

It may be a paradox that the largest country on earth harbours more than any other uncertainties about its historical identity. Where does the true Russia belong? In Europe or in Asia? Can Russia be defined by the quality of its high culture permeated since the eighteenth century with the values of the West? Or does the true soul of Russia beat in the heart of its poorest inhabitants, workers and former serfs? Before the twentieth century many would have looked to the old Orthodox Church, with its roots in Byzantium, to locate the troubled source of Russian Weltschmerz. Certainly, the shock of Napoleon's invasion of 1812 gave Russians a new sense of nationhood, a cherishing of the Motherland and its unspoilt values which became so appealing to artists and intellectuals for the next hundred years. While the special relationship with France could never be the same again, every one of its European neighbours has engaged differently with the enigma that is Russia.

How the Russian enigma can be experienced today- visually, viscerally, conceptually-was the task assigned to some twenty practising artists from western Europe who over the past eighteen months have been travelling in Rodina (the Motherland), from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, from the refinements of St. Petersburg to the birch woodlands of the Don, not neglecting along the way some of the masterworks of Russian music and the arts, thought and literature to find a response each in his own way to this enduring riddle within an enigma…

Craig Barber has created layered, theatrical works, taking their inspiration in part from magical tales from the great well of Russian folklore, in part from religious icons. Present-day considerations intrude in the imagery of the black egg, the black gold that is the oil industry, so crucial a component in Russia's status as a world power.

With something of the bitter, anarchic humour of Gogol, Julian Bell has painted narrative works affording glimpses into the new Russia - a fraught dinner-party confrontation for a new-style entrepreneur whose many lives catch up with him; the roadside rehearsal of a travelling ballet ensemble, preparing for an evening's entertainment at a rural technical college where they will perform 'the Rewrite of Spring…'

Michael Bishop saw in St Petersburg a surreal quality, a sense of strangeness, due in part to the artificial nature of the city's grandiose conception. In a twilight view of the Admiralty, last stronghold of the Tsar's troops after the storming of the Winter Palace, the building looms as a mysterious, theatrical statement, embellished by the artist with many symbolic, Breughel- like details.

Selecting telling detail to express the whole, Hugh Buchanan has focused on the glitter of grand ornamental urns observed at Pavlosk, unblemished surfaces of gold, reflecting the 'clarity, cold and crispness of the February light cast by a snowy landscape outside'.

In his newest dynamic mode of lyrical abstraction, Maurice Cockrill has found powerful imagery, expressive in The Last Empress of an uncompromising, autocratic personality and in Ice Storm of the power of northern winter, to give turbulent form to his interpretation of the Russian experience.

In Haymaking and the Stroganov Chapel, compositions as lyrical as they are austere, Genevieve Dael has realised a deep sympathy for the ancient rhythms of life in provincial Russia.

Greatly at home in the country which has traditionally shown more respect for literature than any other art form, in his Russian travels John Fisher has added another chapter to his pursuit of Writers' Rooms, finding new subjects in the homes of Gorky, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well as those of the composers Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Ramsay Gibb, painter of immense open spaces, of sea, solitude and silence, chose to travel eastwards from Moscow on the Volga River. Continuing south to Kazan, capital of Tatarstan as far as the Caspian Sea, then north again to Volgograd on the Don to the Sea of Asov, an experience of the Russian heartland where so many peoples and religions meet.

Drawn to the traditional architecture and social customs of rural Russia, Stephen Hubbard has created complex pieces in intarsia, oils and carved wood around the worlds of a princess from the Urusbiev in the Terek region of the Caucasus, a young Buryat girl from Lake Baikal, a matchmaker of the Kachin from the upper Yenisey River.

Barry Kirk, confesses that Russia came to him first, overwhelmingly, in the National Gallery's 2004 exhibition Russian landscape in the age of Tolstoy. The monumental forests of Ivan Shishkin, where giant trees crush the viewer under their imagined weight (daunting for a painter more used to working close to the ground, inspecting mushrooms), has drawn from Kirk a distilled, quiet homage.

Peter Miller, master of the atmospheric etching in photogravure has contributed moody scenes from an Irkutsk locked in midwinter.

In a palette confined to pale blues, ochres and every shade of grey but never white Gerald Mynott has found his own wintry Moscow, vapours rising from charcoal braziers and chimney stacks into a leaden sky, as with the colours every sound muted in the lightly falling snow.

Attracted as ever by the challenge of inhospitable terrain, Heather Pocock went to the lakes, peatland and oak forests of the Polesie lowland, notable as a habitat of rare wildlife, to track wolves and bison.

Leaving Moscow for Suzdal and Vladimir, and later travelling on to St. Petersburg, Lucy Raverat recalls Russia as 'ticking on a very slow timer', with a scale, a vastness, an intimation of massive excess and wastefulness all its own, elderly roadside traders in fruit and vegetables silhouetted against the bravura of heroic statuary…

In canvases dramatically illuminated by his virtuoso deployment of chiaroscuro, Alain Senez has created a series of images which explore contrasts between grandeur and great need so fundamental to the Russian experience, particularly in literature.

Wendy Sutherland has conjured a dynamic, poetic world shaped by the forces of winter where

'frozen forests of birch send down roots of molten silver
bleeding and weeping searching for rebirth
their quest breathes life into our earth.'

At the shrine of St Dmitri in the Yaroslevsky Monastery near Rostov and later at Sergiyev Posady (formerly Zagorsk) where he visited the fortress monastery of St. Sergius, once a base for the legendary icon painter Andre Rublev, Julian Vilarrubi sought to capture the character of buildings which for him spoke beyond eloquence of this nexus of Russian spirituality and national character.

In canvases dense with references to traditional Russia from dachas to snowy woodland, icons and peasant weaving, John Wealleans subverts all the elements with his ironic eye keenly attuned to contrast and incongruity.

Intrigued by the rites of passage and the routes of traditional religion in rural Russia, Anna Wimbledon has chosen to focus on the borderland, real and metaphorical, separating Christian notions of faith from the semi-pagan practises of some country dwellers. There is a hint of the khorovod, the old circle dance, which seeks to draw down the magical properties of the sun in Wimbledon's vision of marriage ceremonies performed in forest clearings, echoing Viking or Slavic cults of damp Mother Earth, origin of the myth of Mother Russia.

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