Flor et Lavr Gallery, in collaboration with the Masters school, presents A Garden Bloomed Behind the House — a commemorative exhibition honoring the Leningrad artist Gelya Pisareva (1933–2024), to be held at Levashovsky in St. Petersburg.

The exhibition brings together the legacy of this remarkable sculptor, painter, and graphic artist — a figure whose practice became an integral part of Russian artistic culture — and the works of artists from the Ozerki — Artists’ Village collective, with whom Pisareva lived, worked, and exhibited: Valery Bytka, Alexander Pozin, Marina Spivak, Dmitry Verdyan, and her final student, Darina Romasheva.

In one of the spaces at Levashovsky, paintings unfold a landscape of memory where time and place intersect — the house in Ozerki, its surroundings, its inhabitants. Scenes from everyday life — her daughter Natalia, grandson Ivan, and the dog Kuza — recur from canvas to canvas, quietly tracing the rhythm of life. These works are closely tied to her final workshop, which appears frequently in paintings from the 2000s onward. Personal recollections shared by her family enrich the exhibition, offering insight into Pisareva’s world: the quiet of the village, the workshop, the garden — a space where art and life were deeply intertwined.

The exhibition also features Pisareva’s wooden sculptures, works by Darina Romasheva, and pieces by her long-time artist collaborators Valery Bytka and Dmitry Verdyan.

Levashovsky’s former boiler room will become a site of dialogue between Pisareva’s sculptural practice and that of her collaborators from the collective. Sculptural compositions by Alexander Pozin, Valery Bytka, Dmitry Verdyan, and Marina Spivak will be shown alongside hers, continuing a creative conversation that spanned decades. In her later years, working with wood and stone became increasingly difficult, yet one of her last stone sculptures — preserved in her workshop — will be presented in the exhibition.

This sculptural section takes the form of a symbolic garden — the kind that might lie behind the home of each artist in the collective. It echoes a recurring motif in Pisareva’s work: the garden as an intimate space for reflection and inspiration.
A Garden Bloomed Behind the House is not a retrospective, but a living story — of an artist, her world, and the people who shaped it alongside her.