Artist Alina Blumis was born in Minsk, Belarus.
She lives and works in New York, NY. — alinabliumis.com
Francis Bacon.
Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours
(from Muybridge). 1961.
Oil on canvas.
Courtesy of Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague.
It was 1988, I was 16, a 10th grader in a boarding Art School named after Ahremchik in Minsk, capital of The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Our Art School was considered one of the best, with countless hours of drawing, painting and art history classes. At this time in our school, like in the rest of in the USSR, modern art was unwelcome and considered 'decadent bourgeois formalism’ (it was labeled this way by Stalin in 1930).
One week in 1988 the whole class was on school-organized trip to Moscow and We did the usual: the Red Square, Kremlin Museum, Tretyakov Gallery.
Central House of Artist came next: the whole class entered the exhibition space, we were not aware and our teachers weren't either that we were about to see the first Francis Bacon exhibition in the Soviet Union. Of course, none of us including our art teacher knew the artist's name and at this point it didn’t matter. All I remember was a huge aesthetic impact, an almost physical experience like when you want to “eat with your eyes” and “photocopy everything with your brain”. It was not about liking, not liking, judging, reflecting or analyzing. I remember vividly how I stepped onto the street after the show, took a deep breath, looked around and thought “I am changed”. It was not for better of worth, it was just “changed”.
This show was for me a sign of the post-Communist era, Perestroika happened in 1989 and then everything around me changed.
Alina Bliumis