Still life with a reproduction of Lucas Cranach 1970

Valentin Khrushch made this painting, Still life with a reproduction of Lucas Cranach, with oil on canvas. Khrushch has this distinctive style: an earthy palette, roughly applied, always in the midst of becoming. He's unafraid of muddying his colours, and the beauty of this piece is in the way the different planes of representation come together. Look at that blobby rock-like form at the center – thick swirls of white and black, like toothpaste squeezed onto the canvas. Then, above it, there's the painting within a painting, a hazy recreation of Cranach's reclining nude. The original is crisp, but here it’s like a half-remembered dream. This little picture provides a point of focus, while the textures and tones create a feeling of enclosure, a kind of interior space. The colour palette is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter in his sombre mode, or maybe even some of the darker interiors of Philip Guston. It invites us to think about how artists borrow, steal, and transform ideas across generations, and it's a kind of painterly conversation, full of questions and no easy answers.