Monumentalist, Painter Sabitjan Bakashev

Sabitjan Bakashev places great importance on the beauty of pictorial texture and the brightness of color in his paintings. The essence of the depicted theme appears in his works as starkly unambiguous, largely abstractly schematized, yet always sounding solemn and festive due to the significant decorative merits of form. Like most Kyrgyz artists, he enjoys depicting nature; however, it appears in a transformed, highly decorated guise, with a realistic, professionally executed drawing serving as the foundation of the compositions, only slightly and tastefully stylized. The colors, on the other hand, are arbitrarily conventional, bright, and festive, harmoniously constructed despite their distance from the real color combinations and saturation of living nature.
An example of this is the painting "Singing Mountains." The panorama of mountain ranges, conditionally interpreted in terms of plasticity and color, is rhythmically composed along the vertical axis of the canvas. In the center, there are young women and a young man playing music, dressed in national theatrical costumes. The fragmented rhythms of lines and color spots create a unique melody. In this pictorial image, the song-like quality serves not only as a theme but also as a form of spatial resolution and all its parts.
The painting "Poppy Growers," by the nature of its artistic solution (vertical format composition, conventionality of decorative color, flatness of spatial resolution), resembles a tapestry or a fresco.
The painting "News" (1969), dedicated to Kyrgyzstan during the Great Patriotic War, is more restrained in color. Like Bakashev's other works, it is close in style to the monumental painting of this period due to its generalized and conventional interpretation of the landscape environment and human figures. However, it possesses the power of deep emotional impact characteristic of easel painting. The color palette is harmoniously developed, and the musicality of linear movement is subtly emphasized, achieving the plastic integrity of the canvas.
A good understanding of national types and ethnographic realities contributed to the creation of a truthful and profound artistic image in a decorative-monumental sense.