IN THE SAME BREATH
Laziza Tulaganova, Nigina Mirzadzhanova, Jama Adilov & Kxadja Fatkhullaev

What is the contemporary art of Uzbekistan, what role do young artists play in it? Frol Burimsky is trying to find an answer to this not too simple question in a new exhibition, guided by many years of impressions collected during his trips around the country. At the same time, the curator's choice of personalities and artistic credos of each author is emotional rather than rational, it is no coincidence that the project is called 'In The Same Breath'. The exhibition features works by four young Tashkent artists: painters Laziza Tulaganova, Nigina Mirzadzhanova, Jama Adilov and sculptor Nosirkhoja Fatkhullaev.
 
Still life and portrait - genres that imply a concentration of objectivity and personality, are favoured by Laziza and Nigina. Their paintings show a leisurely flow of time, unhurried people - drinking tea, sleeping, playing chess, doing laundry - living not only in their city apartments, but also in the mahalla, a special communal space and social concept of living together for which not only Uzbekistan is famous, but also many regions that have experienced historical influence of Iranian cultural tradition.
 
In the context of patriarchal life and modern Uzbek society, we see how freely young artists work, having their own view of things and striving for expressiveness and recognition of the image. Both of them, already at a new round of European art influences, are still interested in the masters of Russian and European avant-garde, the language of the Fauvist Henri Matisse, the contrasts and expression of Schiele, the linearity of the Leningrad school and the lapidary forms of the masters of the Moscow 'severe style'. However, the techniques well known to the European viewer - the geometry of forms, the rigid 'stained-glass' contour, the local decorative colour, the ornamental character of the image, also come from the traditional decorativeness of Uzbek medieval art. It is impossible not to recall here how the art of the East (and partly of Central Asia) influenced the art of Europe and Russia at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries.
 
Colour plays an important role in the works of Nigina and Laziza. It is either bright and forced - pink, red, ochre, or, on the contrary, twilight, greenish or deep blue, like painting with cobalt on ceramics (the South always seeks to escape from the scorching sun rays into a saving shadow). The rhythms of textile ornaments - from Matisse with his love for Arabian fabrics to traditional Uzbek suzane. Even the rhythm of wallpaper, parquet, and tile ornament in urban interiors is a strict geometry of stripes and cells, juxtaposed with planes and volumetric objects. Humanly expressive curves of familiar everyday objects - chairs, dressers, lamps in the spirit of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse of Nigina Mirzadzhanova. And more rigid, elegant female silhouettes of Laziza Tulaganova, reminiscent of the stylizations of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
 
In contrast, there are paintings by two more Tashkent artists, Jama Adilov and Nosirkhodja Fatkhullaev. Their images belong to another world, broken and as if turned inside out. The world of aggression and eternal existential crisis, with modern toothy genies and antipodes, African Picassos and Francis Bacon's brutal bodies, hares abandoned by the mistress, and other cruel civilizational attributes that even the most traditional society inevitably comes to in the modern world.