On 15 January an exhibition opened in the Foyer of the Hermitage Theater presenting 25 works by Petersburg artist Marina Azizian executed in needle and thread during the past year. This is a joint project of Italian poet Tonino Guerra and Marina Azizian, St Petersburg artist for the theater. The theme of the exhibition is the alphabet.

Marina Azizian is an artist of the theater who collaborates with well known stage designers, directors, and choreographers. She has created a great number of productions in such places as the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow (Swan Lake, La Boheme). She has also worked in cinema on the films Monologue, Kain XII, The Guest, and others.

Marina Azizian’s favorite medium is needlework. Her compositions around letters resuscitate and give visual dimension to ancient tongues such as Greek, Latin, Armenian and Russian. She knows how to extract expressiveness from any material, not by reworking it but by uncovering its natural properties. An image on a decorative panel grows out of the letters and turns into the letters; the roots of various cultures are intertwined and merge into a unified system.

Large and small compositions, integral and complex, created from swatches of material: they all embody certain eternal forces imbued with Holy Scripture, mythology, folk art, and her own observations.

A special place in the works of Marina Azizian is reserved for letters and cryptograms. She decorates the letter with ornaments and designs, flowers and birds. Behind a single letter we can hear a whole orchestra of ideas, faith and traditions. Her methodology is based on jeweler’s precision as she fixes one piece of material to another, makes unexpected combinations of cloth together with her own embroidery.

On the day of the opening of the exhibition, 15 January 2004, the Hermitage Theater was the venue for a stage show in which Tonino Guerra and Alisa Freindlikh, State Artist of Russia, as well as a number of actors from the Litsedei Theater troupe participated. The director of the show was Grigory Dityakovsky from the G.V. Tovstonogova Drama Theater.

News source: www.hermitage.ru
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