#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. By 1990, the graphic artist and painter from Norilsk Sergey Morozov had become well known not only in the Krasnoyarsk region. Participant of different kinds of exhibitions, from city to all-Union ones, he became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1980. By this time, his track record included two personal exhibitions in Norilsk and one in Dudinka. Over the next 20 Norilsk years, there were still many exhibitions, expeditions and outstanding works. The artist left the northern city on the eve of the new millennium. Today Sergey Morozov’s canvases and graphic sheets of the 1970s–1990s are kept in the Norilsk Museum, which united the collections of the gallery and the museum itself, and in the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore.
In Dudinka, in the collection of fine art, there are more than 70 works by the master, including the graphic series of 1990 – In memory of the Norillag. In a composition with bloody bandages fluttering in the wind over the figures covered with a snowy shroud, the artist seemed to have absorbed and splashed onto the paper the sorrow and suffering of the past Norillag. The imagery and energy of the sheet tell about the prisoners of Norilsk forced labor camp no less, if not more, than words.
Works from this series are also in the collection of the Norilsk Museum. They were exhibited for the first time in the year of its creation at the Memorial Week. Evaluating the new compositions, the admirer of the artist’s talent, a prominent Norilsk journalist Gunar Kroders, recalled portraits of the Norilsk citizens, honorary citizens and Heroes of Socialist Labor, made by Morozov for the 50th anniversary of the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Combine. According to the journalist, that portrait gallery absorbed all the best that the artist had found over the previous ten creative years, including graphic compositions from the life of tundra people, book illustrations, landscapes, and portraits. The master of cultural journalism admitted that he discovered a new Morozov, who partly returned to his origins, as the artist began his career in the visual arts with the theater. In the Norillag series, this theatricality brought the compositions to a high imaginative level.
As soon as the Dudinka museum workers got Morozov’s graphics they included the work To the First in a complex dedicated to the history of the Norillag. And in the new exposition in the current museum building on Sovetskaya street, 30, the renewed thematic complex still unites the image created by the former Norilsk artist.
Text: Valentina Vachaeva, Photo: Taimyr Museum of Local Lore
