From curl to grape. Exhibition "Heat and cold metal". Decoration of the Vetkovo icon" takes place in Minsk

The National Art Museum has an exposition “Heat and Cold of Metal”. Decoration of the Vetkovsk icon from the collection of the Vetkovsk Museum of Old Believers and Belarusian traditions named after F. G. Shklyarov. This is not the first time that friendship between museums has resulted in the organization of interesting exhibitions. The current exhibition dedicated to salaries is unique primarily in that it focuses on the minted surface and shows not so much the icons themselves as their framing.

According to Yuri Kotlyarov, director of the Vetkovo Museum of Old Believers and Belarusian Traditions, a huge work on the restoration of salaries presented today at the NHM site has been going on since the end of last year: Almost from scratch, our employees have restored more than 50 salaries, which is more than half of the works presented at the exhibition. We have been collecting this collection since the late 1970s. On the features of the exhibition stopped her curator, employee of the Vetkovsk Museum Honored Worker of Culture Galina Nechaeva:

- We didn't get the finished collection as an inheritance. Everything from the first to the last job was gathered before my eyes. We traveled, collected, bought or found these amazing icons, each with its own story.

The payment for the icon “Uspenie” of the XVIII century from the village of Novy Krupets of Dobrush district is one of the most spectacular exhibits.

- We found the icon during the expedition just in the attic, the owners pointed to it, says Galina Nechaeva. No less dramatic was the fate of the salary and the icon of the Great Martyr Nikita-warrior. It was torn into fragments, and restorers had to assemble it like a puzzle on a wooden substrate, strengthening each piece. The icon itself was brought to the museum only 30 years after the salary was included in the collection. In total, the exhibition presents 74 salaries for icons of the Vetkov tradition and a total of 125 works of art. Collected minted and beaded salaries, voluminous wooden kiot with gilding, icons and drawings, tools of master coiners and family relics of the famous dynasty of the priests, including photographs. Part of the exhibition was donated by this dynasty.

Most of the exhibits were brought back to life by restorers Mikhail Pugachev and Igor Zogov. Specialists cleaned objects from dirt and corrosion, restored lost parts and collected salaries for fragments. Many salaries are made in the ancient technique of fire gilding with mercury, which when directed light creates a special noble radiance. The exposition shows not only finished products, but also the process of their creation - from drawings to tools.

According to Galina Nechaeva, the methods of work of ancient masters for modern understanding are in many ways paradoxical:

- For modern understanding paradoxical ways of thinking masters, the organization of their space, fit in a few millimeters of metal plate. They appear in architectural structures with a reverse and spherical perspective, in the “soft” landscape that combines ancient symbolism with an immediate sense of nature, as well as in the epic narrative.

The exhibition will run until October 25.

pepel@sb.by