Sensations
“There were days, weeks, and months when my city was taken over by a sequence of aromas.”
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Flea Market, Date Unknown, Collection of Yevgeny Kalinsky.
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Recess, Date Unknown, Collection of David Birnbaum.
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Hot Maize, Date Unknown, Collection of the artist’s family.
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Playing Rings, Date Unknown, Collection of Yevgeny Kalinsky.
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Koltmachter the Barber, Date Unknown, Collection of Mark Kelner and Margarita Litvak-Kelner.
“When some barber cut my hair and shaved me, he would always propose to ‘freshen me up.’ Without waiting for me to agree, he’d use his rubber-bulb syringe to spray my face with the contents of a bottle labeled ‘White Lilac,’ much to my annoyance...That bottled lilac was attempting to drain my memory of color, depriving it of the beauty I so valued.”
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Early Morning , 1974, Collection of the artist’s family.
The banner at the top of the painting advertises a popular silent film from 1923: “Announcement: the movie theater, The Mirror of Life will show Red Devils.”
Ladyzhensky painted watermelons many times, praising the fruit’s “defiant gorgeousness,” and its “stunning effect with its contrasting outside and inside, with its vivid dark green, then light green, and its intricately striped, light and dark, bright open red inside, and finally its black pips.”
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Firewood for Winter, Date Unknown, Collection of David Birnbaum.
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Yefim Ladyzhensky, Discounted Goods for Sale, Date Unknown, Collection of Yevgeny Kalinsky.
Portable stoves, top hats, and chamber pots on the seller’s red blanket each recall objects from specific manufacturers, which Ladyzhensky remembers from his youth.