B IS FOR BURYATIA

My mama pointed me towards this fantastic Buryat artist, because she keeps passing his artwork at a gallery at a local mall near Moscow and he’s great. Buryats are the indigenous people of Siberia of Mongolian descent who have a rich culture and amazing costumes. I love that Zorikto Dorzhiev portrays both in his art, and makes fantastic paintings and sculptures that portray people of Buryat heritage in common landscapes and costumes, and incorporate the fantastic and the magical. His paintings are masterful and evolved, yet bear the lightness and imaginativeness of illustration, which, to me, is a necessity for contemporary figurative art. Dorzhiev has many great paintings that try to trace contemporary Buryats to the heyday of the Mongol hordes, or play with folklore. But I also just fell in love with these sculptures, because we don’t get enough feisty Asian superheroes, do we? Especially of Buryat descent. (BTW the most famous person of Buryat ancestry (albeit partial) was Yul Brynner).