Yuri Kalyuta is one of the most talented contemporary painters of Russian Academy. His exhibition in Rome, where he lived and worked, is called: Red on red (Rosso su Rosso).
Born in 1957 in Krivoi Rog in Ukraine, he graduated in 1977 from the School of Art “Grekov” Odessa and continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, a student of Master Andrei Mylnikov. He graduated from the I.E. Repin State Academic Institute of Arts, Sculpture and Architecture in 1989. Since 1991 he is a member of Russian Union of Artists and since 1998 he is a member of the teaching staff of the painting department of the I.E. Repin Institute. He currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and is Academic of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, where he received the Gold Medal for the series of paintings made between 2001 and 2005. In 2009 he was also awarded the title of Honoured Artist of Russia.
His works, of great emotional impact, have been exhibited in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai and for the first time in Italy with the exhibition at the Vittoriano, in Rome.
The art of Yuri Kalyuta combines the tradition of the academic school and the violent and contrasting combinations, featuring decorative painting, which give his paintings strong and determined tones through the brushwork and the use of emotional colors. Warm and cool tones, bright colors and in contrast, colours expressing passions and feelings. Yuri Kalyuta’s pictorial language does not play a simple aesthetic and decorative role; its narrative principles are rich in meanings, investigating the psychological aspects of the figures represented. Throughout his artistic activity the artist reveals his predilection for portrait, in particular the family love: for Kalyuta life is the family, as a single entity, a space permeated by love.
The Russian artist Sergei Goryaev, member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, described his art as follows: “with the clarity of his vision, the freshness of the colors, the virtuoso brilliance of his brushwork and the poetry of his soul Yuri Kalyuta forces us to love his work because he genuinely loves art, nature, life. ”
Carlo MARINO
