SaveLove
| Year of creation | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 70 W × 90 H × 2.5 D cm |
| Type of art | painting |
| Style | fine art |
| Genre | nude |
| Materials | oil, canvas |
| Type of packaging | wooden box |
Description of the Artwork “Love”
I like to look at a beautiful male body. Therefore, I am sad that there are so little masculine sensuality and beauty in the art world. About 30 years ago, a group of feminist artists, Guerrilla Girls, decided to determine the ratio of male and female nudes presented on canvases exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It turned out that male nudes are only 15%. And it seems that today the situation has not changed much. On online galleries where I sell my art, male nudes are about 20%. While the female nude is generally regarded as a staple on the finest of museum walls, the male nude has managed to maintain an air of illicitness up until the present day, continuing to trouble people in different ways. This phenomenon's root cause is because art history was a “white straight men only” club for a long time. Its creators have used mechanisms of suppression of rights and marginalization of minorities. And the culture of the dominant patriarchal and heterosexual discourses is still in
Artwork in the interior
Oleksandr Balbyshev, Ukraine
Oleksandr Balbyshev was born in 1985 in Ukraine, one of the biggest Soviet Republics. After graduating from The Prydniprovska State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in 2012, he was working in the sphere of architecture and design. But he was disappointed in the chosen field. So in 2016 he quit to become an artist. Oleksandr currently lives and works in Dnipro, Ukraine. Male sexuality and sensuality are the most important themes in Oleksandr’s art. But it's a means rather than an end in itself. Artist wants viewer to see the realm of ideas in faces and bodies not only a realistic image of a human. He tries to combine in his paintings realities, as visions of worlds within worlds. They show us an image of ourselves, and also hint that there is more to us than we know. Another important part of Oleksandr’s art is to modify old Soviet-era portraits of Lenin. In 2015 the Ukrainian government banned all symbols and images associated with the USSR. But numerous oil portraits, sculptures, monuments and other images of Lenin began to be removed from public places decades before the "decommunization laws". What happened to the hundreds of thousands portraits of former Soviet leader? Many of them are already destroyed. Some of them had been left in attics or basements. Oleksandr is looking for all these forgotten things and giving them a new life. His paintings are in private collections in USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Finland, South Africa, Thailand, Australia, Mexico and Ukraine.