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Bitman Igor
Igor Bitman lives and works in Paris, France. The winner of the numerous awards, his works are in the private and museum collections in Switzerland, Canada, USA, Italy, Russia and France.
1993 Prix Spécial du Jury - Paul Louis Weiller, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
1994 Médaille d'Argent au Salon des Artistes Français.
1995 Obtient le Grand Prix de Peinture Paul Louis Weiller, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
1997 Médaille d'Or au Salon des Artistes Français.
Igor Bitman is one of the Russians who has chosen to live in our country (France) - (comment by IFDS ). He was born in 1953, the year when Stalin died. He was a dissident painter in the USSR who was saved from poverty by his talent as a portrait painter. He exhibited in private flats and took part in the nonconformist Muscovite painters' exhibition at the VDNKH Palace of Culture which ended in clashes with the authorities.
He left the USSR in 1981. He learnt his solid art in the Russian Academies. He is aware of it and it shows.
Bitman vigorously places himself in the Grand Tradition illustrated by such painters as Petrov-Vodkine and Balthus. Far from any form of expressionism, he strives for classical continuity, in other words a slow pace through a combination of willpower and thirst for knowledge rather than speedy showmanship. You do net need to be an art critic to realize from the outset that we are dealing with an artist who has reached such a degree of perfection that the only problem posed by his technique is how to delve further into his thoughts.
Bitman's drawing is essential, through his precision and selection, to gain the essence of form and construction. His painting, sometimes streaked but never pointillist, in his reclining nudes down to the grain of their skin, manages to breathe life into inert objects in his still lives and succeeds in his landscapes in simultaneously expressing apparitions of what have already become memories. Lire abounds everywhere with the frailty of the ephemeral. Light unexpectedly surges out from chiaroscuro blending a woman's body into the painting's background which has produced or absorbed it. The whole history of painting is here, with this artist who is producing today while reflecting from one subject to another and one artist to another through a series of scrupulously assimilated references from Piero Della Francesca to Vermeer and from Zurbaran to Chardin.
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