St Petersburg, Russia - Alexander Timofeev was born into a family of artists in 1971, Leningrad. He studied at the art school attached to the Academy of Arts, then at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg under Johannes Grützke. Since 1994 the artist has lived and worked mainly in Germany. Since 1996 he has actively contributed to the exhibitions in Germany. The exhibition will be on display till March 17, 2008.
 
A nursling of the Russian academic school, this unique preserve of traditional art crafts, Timofeev has combined both Russian and German artistic experience in his oeuvre. In St Petersburg he mastered the skill of academic drawing, compositional theory and learned to paint. This knowledge was the only capital he took abroad and benefited from. He placed his stake on the uniqueness and magic of man-made realistic painting, which has become the necessity of life.
 
The genre of psychological thriller, so popular today in the movies and literature, is close to the artist. He is keen on “basic” and “eternal” oppositions: life – death, love – hatred, love – violence – so to say, on everything that, thanks to Sigmund Freud, we call Eros and Thanatos. The painterly action starts where the extremes meet and stratify. This space is the “secret room” of our soul where our most concealed desires and fears grow without witnesses. The artist acts as a catcher and instigator of those brief moments when these strata are seen “in light”.
 
Alexander Timofeev likes to tell stories and knows how to do it. One wants to read Timofeev’s paintings like a text, like novellas with a sequel, they can be narrated, like films of the silent era. One wants to read Timofeev’s paintings like a text, like novellas with a sequel; they can be narrated, like films of the silent era. They are full of eloquent details; their personages migrate from one subject to another. A circle of actor-models gradually forms. Each has his or her type of role. The artist, like a director, allocates the parts and arranges the scene. We, the viewers, attend, as it were, different performances by one and the same little troupe.
 
As the theme evolves the action shifts to a dark enclosed space, to the “secret room.” The indefiniteness, anonymity of this dark space makes it impossible to establish for certain whether it exists in reality or only in the minds of the personages. The artist gives us no hint, allowing us to interpret for ourselves, “to the extent of our depravity”, what is happening in the painting. The pictorial element is calculated to provoke the appearance of our inner flaws. The narration is reduced to the size of a single instant, a single flash of light that as in Caravaggio’s paintings snatches the figures out of darkness. The effect of the narration is achieved through its serial nature when its numerous parts are linked together in polyptychs.
 
Surrealism, school of metaphysics, new corporeality, hypo-realism.  The art of the past century has invented various ways of revealing the visible world, denial of its solidity and rationality. Timofeev’s oeuvre is ideologically rooted there. Its illusionary realism is deceptive and does not suggest any reality of the depicted image. It is impossible to define if the hero has actually leaved through all the peripetia of life or meanders in the dark labyrinths of his own soul. Man, woman or a child are the components of the concealed “ego”, interlocutors of the inner dialogue of the hero rather than the real subjects. The bonds of love and hatred unite them. They interchange roles and positions, change clothes, transform, live and die one in the other.
 
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