Private-run art galleries have developed into an integral part of Kazakhstan’s artistic life and business today. They serve the artistic and creative sector of the economy with a display to the public, and offer artists communication, promotion, collection, technology and other expertise to keep the art sector in business. Art galleries collect support from other private sectors, and encourage new trends in artistic life and fine arts’ overall development.

The Arvest Art Gallery was established in early 2007 downtown Almaty. Its opening seemed to go against all odds at a time when other private-owned art galleries in the city were closing down, with their owners having lost their enthusiasm and their confidence in the market. Financial resources had become scant, and may galleries failed to generate sufficient income to pay for the rent of their premises and other routine costs. In such an atmosphere, the opening of a new gallery can be considered to have been a very bold step indeed.

Arvest’s initiator, owner and the new gallery’s ideological mastermind was, and still is, Rimma Tsakanyan, an Almaty-based businesswoman who had built up a profound awareness of trends in both Kazakh and international fine arts and their market conditions. She contributed to artistic life with her genuine interest in arts combined with her expertise in commercial entrepreneurship. This catalogue, which offers an overview of her four-year-long commitment to her gallery, amply illustrates her dedication and sense of strategy in developing the business.

Arvest occupies a modest space in an up-market zone of the centre of Almaty. It owns its own premises – meaning that it does not have he periodical financial constraints many other galleries have had. The gallery’s interior design breathes the spirit of esthetic awareness needed to host exhibitions of high artistic level.

Arvest is an Armenian word meaning art as well as knowledge and creation. The word’s multi-polar meaning is symbolic for the idea behind the gallery in terms of multicultural orientation which forms the basis of the enterprise’s overall policy. Here, art-lovers based in Almaty can get acquainted with work by artists from all parts of the region and beyond in the form of exhibitions small in size but of superior quality.

During the first four years of its existence, the Arvest Gallery has hosted almost three dozens of individual and collective art exhibitions, including paintings, sculptures, graphic art and photography. Material used for the exhibits included ceramics, wood and silver. The overall style of the gallery’s exhibits reflects a romantic artistic view of the world expressed by their creators. The works tend to express sense of tradition and established artistic values combined with a personal view on life, as a result of a versatile personality of the creator. This idea grants visitors high-level artistic achievements and high-quality works of art.

During the four years of its existence, the gallery has built up steady working relations with individual artists and art collectives of our generation, who have contributed both to Arvest’s occasional exhibitions and its home collection. Names in this regard include Georgiy Makarov, Carmine Barbaro, Sergey Ledyaev, Svetlana Plotnikova, the Khusainov (GaBo) sisters and Vagif Rakhmanov. Christmas exhibitions, which have become a tradition at Arvest’s, have been organised by Yelena and Vladimir Grigorian, featuring, among other items, the classical icon paintings by a nun called Afanasiya and the apocryphical icons by Anna Margatskaya.

Other names features at Arvest’s exhibitions include those of Aibek Rozakov, Yuri Plotnikov, Anatoly Dashko, Dulat Aliev, Askar Yesdaulet, Anara Abzhanova, Violetta Knutova and Natalya Litvinova. Works displayed at the gallery represent a variety of expressive styles. Among examples are Andrei Noda’s expressionist works, Vladimir Gvozdev’s decorative style based on ethnic themes, Timur Akanaev’s relief technique and the poetry-inspired ceramics of Alexander Lvovich. Among Kazakh masters of name and fame featured by the gallery are Tokbolat Toguzbayev, Ivan Bondarenko, Olga Kuzhelenko and Ariy Shkolny. The gallery’s policy is aimed at presenting works by artists from various regions in the republic. In this respect, the discovery of the artist Baimakhan Sherimov from Zhambul and his subsequent exhibition at Arvest was marked as a special event for the Almaty public.

The gallery also has made it part of its strategy to look for masters of art abroad. Examples are the works of Elinor Brodsky (Israel), Nune Danielyan (Armenia), Leah Newman (USA), Udzhal Akhverdiyev (Azerbaijan) and Astar Momunbek (Kyrgyzstan). In 2009, Arvest hosted a personal exhibition of the Georgian painter Alexander (Sandro) Antadze, who has been working with the gallery from the day of its opening. Another important event has been the exhibition of Rasim Mikhaeli, who resides in Spain.

One more noteworthy event has been the photo exhibition under the motto “To look, to see, to show – Treasures of Central Asia, recorded in a click”, held at the gallery in 2008, which became a prestigious international event. Women from Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, Kazakhstan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the USA, France and South Africa presented their work. What made the project special was that all revenue from the sale of their works were donated to charity.

Another important activity of the Arvest gallery is the art workshop, in which lessons in art techniques are given to adults and children, in order to give them skills in various types of graphic art, and to develop their creative talents and sense of esthetics. Teachers are the painters Georgiy Makarov and Yelena Gregorian. Special attention is being paid to teaching children. One of the results has been an exhibition consisting of works by Georgiy Makarov’s pupils under the theme “Elaborating a pattern of marvel”.

The gallery has a proactive network of promotion of all its exhibitions, and publishes booklets and series of postcards. The gallery also maintains a website on which all updated information on all exhibitions is presented on a regular basis. Arvest also undertakes efforts to participate in the country’s cultural and artistic life. Thus, in 2009, the gallery was represented at the Parade of Galleries at the A. Kasteev museum.

Artworks gain appreciation only when they can be seen. At Arvest, we gather spectators, dritics and admirers for that purpose, which inspires artists and art lovers. There is already a group of regular visitors to the gallery who make sure they do not miss a single event. Many of them are, or have become, collectors who not just admire works of art but make them part of their homely lives. Any visitor to Arvest who is interested in purchasing paintings or sculptures can get professional counsel based on a profound knowledge of the world of contemporary art. Thanks to its expertise, its enthusiasm and constructive policy, the Arvest gallery has become an integral part of cultural life in Almaty within a short period of time, and attracted the attention of experts in fine arts and art collectors.

Alla Dubrovina, art critic.

English edition by Charles van der Leeuw.

drawings

paintings