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Geliy Korzhev
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Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val 
One of the most powerful and vivid artists of the 20th century, Geliy Korzhev was born on July 7, 1925 in Moscow. In 1950 he graduated from the Moscow Surikov Art Institute, where he studied under Sergey Gerasimov. The artist gained wide popularity in the 1950s-1960s, when his canvasses Raising the banner, Lovers and the well-known cycle of works Burned by the War were displayed. Korzhev said: “Life without art, without painting simply loses all sense to me. In creativity I value freedom more than anything. Freedom is to paint what I want and the way I feel and can”. Korzhev represented holistic Russia, with its victories and, to a greater extent, with its sorrow, defeats, and grief. He's a unique phenomenon - a painter of Russian grief.
 The artist studied at Moscow State Art School from 1939 to 1944 under V. V. Pochitalov, M. V. Dobroserdov, and A. O. Barshch. From 1944 to 1950 he studied at the Moscow State Art Institute under S. V. Gerasimov and V. V. Pochitalov.
Following the death of his parents in 1986, Korzhev, in an apparent attempt to find answers to personal questions, started a series of paintings based on the Bible. He said these paintings reflected the views of a person brought up in atheist Soviet Russia.
The works by Korzhev are filled with drama and human empathy. The subjects and characters in his paintings reach a maximum of meaningful and emotional concentration. The exhibition provides an opportunity to see the art of the painter ranking among the titans of the second half of the last century’s Russian painting. Out of the 160 works on display in the exhibition, only 25 are from Russian collections. Most of Korzhev's works were taken out of the Soviet Union after 1986. Almost 40 paintings came from the U.S. collection of Raymond Johnson, a U.S. collector of Russian art. The Tretyakov exhibition displays works from its own collection, the State Russian Museum, the Radishev State Art Museum in Saratov, the Regional Art Museum of Samara, the Regional Fine Arts Museum of Kemerovo, the Krasnodar Fine Arts Museum, as well as from private collections that include Johnson's, the collections of the Institute of Russian Realistic Art, the artist's family and the Geliy Korzhev Foundation. More info
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