Leonid Rotar. [Perimeter]

ARDOR Art Code (a platform for conscious collecting) and Stella Art Foundation present [Perimeter], a solo exhibition by Leonid Rotar.

Leonid Rotar’s paintings are recognizable at a glance. These vast, monumental canvases in cool tones feature large figures seemingly frozen in marble, as if made for the ceremonial halls of otherworldly palaces. Their austere compositions uniquely combine the language of figurative painting with the spirit of geometric abstraction, evoking the resolute figures of Alexander Deineka, the serene detachment of Mark Rothko, and the surreal scenes of Giorgio de Chirico.

Solemn as a march, Rotar’s painting is a direct continuation of the Grand Style, a movement in monumental art that was international as well as Soviet and focused on neoclassical heroism. Although dreams of the “Grand Style” are enjoying a modest revival today, Rotar is not part of the pseudotraditionalist trend in Russian art of the past decade. For more than twenty years, since his exhibitions at the Yakut Gallery in the early 2000s, he has remained faithful to his singular artistic method. This method is a paradoxical fusion across eras of 1930s romantic realism and the cool humanism of the Severe Style, distilled into a simple, unmistakable formula: the “maximum tension of pictorial force” described by Pavel Filonov.

Fields of color awash with his signature “Rotar blue”; scarlet meteors above an ever-empty horizon; strong figures held still as sculpture; and clouds at the zenith, so high that you see them only when lying flat on your back: these hallmarks have run parallel to Russian contemporary art for a quarter of a century, independent of its fashions and market trends. A huge milky-white Moon and a scarlet Sun, recurring images in Rotar’s paintings, can be read as symbols of the equal scale of grand History and a single human life.

Leonid Rotar is the first monumental contemporary artist of the twenty-first century. A realist of the highest order, he strips away superfluous details and errors to hold History outside time on the canvas: a single quantum of action in which a human being and a star are equal partners.

“I say that there is a culture that unites... I think it is realist art. Realism, as we understand it, gives people a shared sense of life.” — From L. Rotar’s interview with A. Steiner about the exhibition “New Russian Realism,” 2013.

The solo exhibition [Perimeter] at Stella Art Foundation brings together the finest works from more than twenty years of Rotar’s practice, including pieces from the well-known series Don’t Be Silent, The End of the World, and Genesis, as well as paintings from his latest series, North (2024–2026).

Artist: Leonid Rotar

Leonid Rotar (born 1962) was born in the Moldavian SSR and graduated from VGIK. He lives and works in Moscow. He has participated in exhibitions since 1988 and has held more than ten solo exhibitions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, as well as undertaking a number of curatorial projects.

Project organizer

ARDOR Art Code — a platform for conscious collecting

Exhibition curators: Arseny Steiner and Ekaterina Miloradova

Arseny Steiner is an art critic and curator responsible for the selection of works and the exhibition design.

Ekaterina Miloradova is the founder of ARDOR Art Code, a curator, art adviser, and producer of Russian and international cultural projects. She is responsible for the project’s production.

Stella Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded by Stella Kesaeva in 2003 to support Russian art and young artists.