Artist who grew up in Cold War USSR has first exhibition in the North West

Debbie Manley | 6th March 2018

USSR artist Olga Geoghegan’s may be a newcomer to the North West but her work has themes in common with our very own LS Lowry – according to gallery owner Susan Eyres.

Olga will be exhibiting at Gateway Gallery in Hale, Cheshire, Friday 16-Saturday 31 March 2018, showcases thirty six oils on canvas, painted between 2005 and 2017.

Susan said: “Olga’s work focuses on scenes from everyday life, often remembered from her childhood… and echoes many of the themes of traditional Northern School paintings: working people remaining stolid against the backdrop of hardship.

“Olga is not only a massively accomplished technician, but her work is haunting and moving, as all the best art should be.”

Born in the sub-arctic industrial town of Ukhta in Russia’s far north in 1965, Olga said: “My paintings are about feelings. A good painting doesn’t need words to be explained. Feelings are universal.”

Talent-spotted as a child, Olga progressed to the prestigious Leningrad Academy of Arts, in an era when the Cold War showed no sign of resolution, and when there were thousands of applicants for each of the handful of places available.

On leaving the academy in 1989, the USSR was on the cusp of great change. With the communist regimes overthrown in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania, the USSR was soon to be dissolved.

In the early 90s, soon after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, she was one of the first Russian painters to be invited to exhibit in Western Europe with successful exhibitions taking place in London and Vienna.

My father back from the front

Olga’s work depicts mainly figures, static and stoical. Sometimes alone, sometimes in small groupings, they seem strangely disconnected from their surroundings and each other. With little discernible landscape to anchor them to a context, her protagonists are free floating and completely exposed.

Much of her work is influenced by the hardships of her family’s life in Soviet Russia. One powerful painting, My Father Back from the Front, is directly biographical and portrays her own father, who survived a shot in the head by a sniper during WWII.

Conscripted at just 17, she says he spoke very little of his wartime experiences in the Caucasus, but did describe how literally outgunned his unit was in comparison to the crack Austrian alpine regiment they faced.

“My father said they had one gun for three soldiers and so they had to take turns to shoot it. The other two had crude wooden paddles and were told to slap them together to make shooting noises. Small boys playing soldiers. They didn’t stand a chance. My father was very lucky to survive,” she says.

Another painting, May, shows her father, who passed away 25 years ago, and his friend celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.  Every year on Victory Day, 9 May, she says they would get together to talk, drink and sing.

A series of paintings called The Small Business Cycle introduces us to a community of street traders. Amongst their number are The Baguette Seller and The Chicken Seller, two hard-working women flanked by their respective wares. No indication is given of the time or place they have set up their stalls, but we are aware of their steely determination to earn a living.

“I paint collective feelings and emotions,” she says. “I don’t share many first hand stories with my audience – that wouldn’t feel right – but I do bare how I have felt about the things that have happened to me.

“People have very different life experiences,” she says, “but their humanity is constant, wherever they are from and whatever era they have lived through.”

Olga has lived in London with her British husband, a translator, since 1998. Her works can be found in private collections all round the world.

For more details visit: gateway-gallery.co.uk

Album 1

A walk with a pomegranateMy father back from the frontThe chicken sellerWallflowerMayWoman and sheep