Artists Will Be Given 5+

Event: Painting Exhibition
Title: “5+”
Organisers: The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the “Wings of Time” Creative Association, led by Leyla Akhundzade

Artists Will Be Given 5+

“5+” is the highest mark, awarded only to the very best. Trying for this mark were five young artists who entered the “5+” exhibition which opened on 10th April in the Museum Centre.

They are very different but are still a team....They are joined by a love of art, an uncontrollable urge to create and by something for which there is no exact definition, which can only be experienced as waves of energy passing from person to person.

They flow over the edge into fantasy, using all their powers to make it reality – representing contemporary Azerbaijani art, multi-schemed and various, like life itself.

Mahmud Rustamov – creator of myths. Filtering ancient myths through the prism of his own consciousness and his world outlook, he presents them in an entirely different form in his bronze sculptures. “Striving for beauty, a person achieves humanity”, he says. Strange and fantastic beings are born of the whirlwind of his imagination – visitors from another, parallel world.

Teymur Rustamov says that the main concept behind his work is the permanent desire of the artist to affect people by his work, making them feel joy, sorrow, fear, delight or pity.... further, creativity is, for him, a constant research and balancing on a razor’s edge in the hope of achieving peace. This is reflected in his work – original sculptures, picturesque and graphic canvases and photographs.

Naira Rustamova paints her own impressions.... a shifting and mysterious world of dreams holds the artist and from here she derives the subject of most of her paintings. Her canvases are light, bright and stimulate a desire for life, to enjoy every day, every ray of sun and drop of rain.

Vugar Muradov , to those who know him, is ‘God’s pipe’.... not especially loquacious, he communicates with the world through his paintings. His favourite subjects – portraits – are carried out in mystical fashion. Perhaps this is why they are portraits of feelings rather than of people....

Niyaz Najafov began painting only three years ago, having had no special education, “No sweating in an institute” as he says. Once he simply took up a brush and began to paint. It became a release for him, a tonic, a gateway to a new life, air.... The genre in which he works, he calls ‘Brutal Realism’. His paintings are harsh and tough, like life itself, and make a strong impression upon the mind of the viewer.

Each artist was allocated a separate room on the 4th floor of the Museum Centre, each showing between 25 and 30 works. We should note that hardly any of the pieces had been exhibited before. The artists prepared for this exhibition over a period of half a year. They had many offers to sell various of the works, but they were all saved for ‘5+ Day’.

The initiator and curator of the exhibition was art specialist Leyla Akhundzade.Although the works of this quintet of artists were successful with local and foreign buyers, they had barely been exhibited in their homeland. Thus they were especially happy to show their work to their compatriots. These paintings are windows into their inner world and perhaps viewers found similarities with their own worlds.