The exhibition explores the work of artist Yulia Kosulnikova. It features over 50 of her works.

Without formal training in painting, she became renowned for her innate talent and recognizable artistic method, comparable to Dostoevsky’s "psychological realism": behind her precise and profound depiction of reality lies a desire to understand humanity. Behind her detailed descriptions of reality, a microcosm familiar and familiar to Yulia, lies a macrocosm of relationships and experiences. The exhibition’s goal is to demonstrate not the artist’s mental idiosyncrasies, but the growth of a creative force that breaks free from the confines of a prescribed environment.

The artist’s works are characterized by their immediacy: they lack the usual and almost obligatory reflection of contemporary art, but instead possess a timeless existentialism in which self-expression is equated with self-realization. Like a chronicler, Kosulnikova depicts what she sees, without dividing the objects of reality into those of greater or lesser importance. She’s interested in everything within her field of vision: hospital wards, corridors, medical chairs, television footage, medical workers and their patients. Yulia finds narrative and storytelling in everyday objects and images, and imbues impersonal spaces and public spaces with an inner life and personal experiences.

Kosulnikova has developed her own unique style: she delineates spaces, sometimes from complex, unconventional perspectives, imbuing them with dynamism through the poses and gestures of the people she depicts. Her color scheme is based on localized coloring, often at odds with the form, creating a relationship between the artistic world and its characters, conveyed through various color combinations.

The second part of the exhibition features a video by Yuri Kozyrev, one of the world’s most renowned war correspondents. Kozyrev is capable of embracing a crisis situation, revealing it not so much in terms of events as in terms of human experience. As a result, the exhibition’s compositional solution is a striking juxtaposition: alongside works by Kosulnikova, a previously virtually unknown artist who works out of inner necessity and is filled with empathy for the reality that has harshly treated him, is a video by Kozyrev, an outstanding master of documentary photography who has quite deliberately limited his range of expressive means to demonstrate his authorship.

Text and photo: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center