Eugène Gabritschevsky
(1893–1979)
Place born Moscow, Russia
Place diedHaar, Germany
BiographyIn 1917, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, Eugen Gabritschevsky completed a graduate degree in biology at the University of Moscow, where he specialized in genetics—a science then only in its infancy—and in hereditary problems, with concentrations in embryology, histology, and the anatomy of vertebrates and invertebrates.Nature, in its broadest sense, remained the core reference of his oeuvre—which exponentially developed after his permanent admission to the Eglfing-Haar Psychiatric Hospital in Germany at the age of thirty-eight. Though unusually diverse, his body of work still employed dominant motifs: wide, placid, amphibian-looking faces; creatures evoking the mystical relationship of man with spiritual forces of nature like this female nude with red hair, lying in front of a rolled parchment covered with hieroglyphics and a pair of wings; serial studies of birds, snakes, and butterflies; and finally, as seen in a second artwork, these ectoplasmic beings who appear to be ceaselessly growing and multiplying, in which yellow and gray shapeless figures with changing facial expressions unfold on a bright-red-toned abstract landscape.
Gabritschevsky used his fingers and brushes to spread his colors, combining different methods—rubbing, scratching, transfer printing—conducive to the creation of suggestive forms that he accentuated at a later stage with a pencil or a pointy tool.