Russian Artist Brings His World Here

-- MERCER ISLAND

Artist Alexander Maltsev says it doesn't matter where he lives. "I'm everywhere," he says, "and my world is inside me."

His tiny daughter, Maria, brought him to this country and keeps him here, despite an undeniable love of homeland that emanates from Maltsev's paintings and collages at the Mercer Island Community Center Gallery.

Elena Bolotskikh, also an established artist, interprets for her husband, who doesn't speak English. Her show of Russian iconographs preceded her husband's works at the community center.

Now Bellevue residents, Maltsev and Bolotskikh came to the United States in early 1991 because Bolotskikh, who had lost her first child for lack of medical care in Russia, wanted to have their baby in this country.

Maltsev's images frequently are imposing, rectangular human figures that dominate the landscape, portrayed in somber browns and blacks accented with splashes of color. He acknowledges inspiration from such Russian artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Severinovich Malevich, abstract, nonreferential painters of the early 20th century.

CALL ACROSS THE YEARS

On the left at the exhibit entrance is Maltsev's conception of his grandfather, a white-bearded peasant in a village of small wooden houses. The figure's mouth is open wide - is it a scream? "He is calling to me from 75 years ago," Maltsev explains.

"I never knew my grandfather," Maltsev said, "for he was

killed in the (1917) Revolution. All pictures and records were destroyed, and my mother grew up in an orphanage." His grandparents had been Kulaks, the well-to-do land-owning class that was wiped out by the Bolsheviks.

A strong sense of family pervades the show. "Babushkas" predominate, as they did in the former Soviet Union where ubiquitous elderly, stooped women, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs, swept the streets, parceled out squares of toilet paper in public restrooms, and guarded hotels and public buildings.

To Maltsev, however, the babushka transcends her menial occupations to signify the strong core that holds family and society together.

With many of his figures, notably in a series of faces, the image terminates at the eyebrows. Are they brainless? On the contrary, Maltsev sees the face as confined to the body but the mind as unfettered, free to range wide in a windblown landscape.

Maltsev, 37, grew up in Borovka, near the Ural Mountains in eastern Russia, studied art in Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), then moved to Novosibirsk in Siberia, where he worked as a designer.

ART OUT OF FAVOR

His artistic genre was out of favor in Communist Russia. "We always were `open' in our studios," Bolotskikh explained, "but outside, our world was closed. We could view Western abstract artists - Rauschenberg, for example - but Russian abstracts were never seen."

The turning point came in 1988, "a powerful year for perestroika (restructuring) in Russia," said Bolotskikh. It was the year she met Maltsev in Moscow, and also the year both finally were allowed to exhibit abroad. Maltsev's works were seen in a traveling exhibit in France and Belgium, the following year in Norway and in 1990 in Spain and Sweden.

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Works by Russian artist Alexander Maltsev will be on display until July 1 at the Mercer Island Community Center Gallery, 8236 S.E. 24th Street. Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.