Famous Masters of Kyrgyz Easel Art

Mosaic Masters.

In the 1980s, Momunbek Akmatkulov began working in the field of monumental painting. He created a mosaic made of smalt (1980) that blends into the environment on the building of the Republican Sports Profile Boarding School and a mosaic on the facade of the administrative building of the Orto-Tokoy Reservoir Management (1983), as well as stained glass that decorates the interiors of the "Ocean" café (1984) and the building of the State Security Committee of the Kyrgyz SSR (1984).

Due to the increased interest in monumental forms of art, well-known masters of Kyrgyz easel art have repeatedly tried their creative possibilities in monumental painting, bringing into it the arsenal of techniques developed in the system of easel forms of painting and graphics.

For example, graphic artist Andrei Nikolaevich Mihalev created a series of mosaic panels on the retaining wall of the Orto-Tokoy Reservoir dedicated to the themes of labor and nature (1977). The compositions "Apple Harvest," "Shepherds," "Chu River," and "Grape Harvest," which develop independent plots, are united by the idea of the eternal union of earth, water, and fertility. They are distinctive in their drawing and rich in color.

Significant in its ideological and imagery content is the smalt mosaic relief "Lenin is with Us" (1978) by Lydia Alexandrovna Ilyina at the building of the Lenin District Committee of the Party in Frunze. It is filled with civic-political pathos, affirming the achievements of the revolution and the happy historical fate of the Kyrgyz and all Soviet peoples. In the center of the composition is a figure of Lenin rendered as a monument. It is surrounded by tightly composed groups of figures that symbolically reveal the main stages of socialist construction in Kyrgyzstan. Here, as in easel graphics, Ilyina appears as an artist with clear compositional thinking, capable of broadly and monumentally generalizing life phenomena. The mosaic, which is strongly drawn and compositionally coherent, is less interesting in terms of color. This is influenced by the strict graphic nature of the artist's handwriting and technical inaccuracies. The mosaic suffers from the randomness of its location — on a freestanding wall that separates the square in front of the district committee building from unplanned urban development.