Maya Kopitzeva, Green Apples, Oil Painting, 1988, Framed

Green still life,apples Maya KOPITZEVA (Gagra, Georgia 1924 - St. Petersburg 2005) Maya Kuzminichna Kopitzeva was born in 1924 in Georgia, but as early as the following year the family moved to St. Petersburg. from 1941 to 1945 she completed art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. from 1946 he attended the prestigious Repin Institute in St. Petersburg under Boris Fogel, Leonid Ovsiannikov and Alexander Zaytsev, graduating in 1951 with Boris Ioganson. In the same year he became a member of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists. from that time he began an intense productive activity, characterized in particular by still lifes and scenes of everyday life, and exhibitions at home and abroad. Among numerous official awards, in 2001 she was awarded the title of Artist Emeritus of the Russian Federation. Maya Kopitzeva is considered one of the leading representatives of the Leningrad School of painting and among the most brilliant Russian post-impressionist colorists of the second half of the 20th century. Particularly significant in her artistic career is the period she spent in Uzbekistan due to the Academy's relocation to Samarkand during World War II. The unusual living conditions and the uniqueness and beauty of Uzbek architecture undoubtedly remained etched in the young painter's memory, as did her stay at the academic dacha near Volochek in the Tver' region (1953), where the authentic flowering of her painting talent began. In her works, in fact, one can trace both the sense of colors and decorations of Islamic art assimilated in Samarkand and the echo of an unspoiled and living nature known during the stay at the painters' dacha. And "very much alive" are paradoxically his still lifes because they do not fit into the narrow frames of the genre. Never scenic and of such pictorial and poetic power as to arouse, despite the compositional rigor concealed behind apparent casualness, sensory impressions of particular vitality. The viewer is struck by the overall originality of the composition and the bold color combinations, reinforced by thick dynamic brushstrokes. The "Peterburgskiy Khudozhnik" museum and exhibition center in St. Petersburg has dedicated an important and extensive retrospective to Maya Kopitzeva from October 20, 2020 to January 10, 2021. MUSEUMS Moscow, Ministry of Culture St. Petersburg, Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts Krasnoiarsk, Museum of Fine Arts Novgorod, Museum of Fine Arts Novosibirsk, Museum of Fine Arts Vologda, Museum of Modern Art Ivanovo, Museum of Fine Arts Kaliningrad, Museum of Modern Art