Carnivals of Saint Petersburg

Technique: Lithograph.
Size: 76 × 56 cm.

A sheet from the eponymous cycle central to Shemyakin's oeuvre, which he pursued over many years, from large paintings to small prints. The cycle draws on the 19th-century Russian lubok and on the masks of archaic cultures – African, Oceanic, Pre-Columbian – assembled into a kind of encyclopedia of the grotesque. Its action unfolds in a phantasmagoric St. Petersburg, where carnival becomes a metaphor for human nature.