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      ‘Banksy of Borovsk,’ a Russian Muralist, Wages His Own War

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      An 84-year-old artist, defying Moscow’s crackdown on dissent, wants his country to acknowledge misdeeds both past and present.An 84-year-old artist was standing in front of one of the many murals he has painted in his provincial hometown one recent day when a group of young women passed by. They had traveled some 60 miles from Moscow just to see his latest work, and they tittered at the encounter.“This is so cool,” said one. “You are the main attraction of town.”The artist, Vladimir A. Ovchinnikov, has long covered the walls of the town with pastoral scenes, portraits of poets and daily life, in the process earning himself a reputation as the “Banksy of Borovsk.” But it is his political art that is now attracting attention. At a time when dissent is being crushed across Russia, Mr. Ovchinnikov has been painting murals protesting the invasion of Ukraine.It is a comparison he does not appreciate. Unlike the mysterious British-based street artist, Mr. Ovchinnikov works for all to see. And where a politically charged new Banksy offering may be cause for sensation, Mr. Ovchinnikov’s murals are not always welcomed — at least, not by the authorities.“I draw doves, they paint over them,” he said.Mr. Ovchinnikov is a rare dissident in Russia, where public criticism of the war can land people in jail or exile. He said his age and his family history offered a modicum of protection, even though he has been fined, questioned by the authorities and pelted with snowballs.“I am different from the majority of people: I’m almost 85 years old, and I’ve got nothing to lose,” he said. “If you are of working age, you can lose your job, and they will pick you up faster. I, an old man, seem to be treated differently.”Borovsk, Russia, where Mr. Ovchinnikov lives.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesMr. Ovchinnikov repairing an old painting of a couple reading.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesHe also said his own history — he did not meet his father until age 11 because his father had spent 10 years in a gulag, and his grandfather and uncle were killed by the state — drove him to denounce violence and war. Upon his retirement as an engineer in Moscow, he settled in his father’s house in Borovsk. His father had chosen the town because as a former political prisoner, he was forced to live at least 60 miles away from the capital.For his service as the town’s public conscience, Mr. Ovchinnikov has repeatedly clashed with local officials. Amid the domestic crackdown that has accompanied the war, he has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. Many of Mr. Ovchinnikov’s murals are covered over within days or weeks.Across from the town’s voenkomat, or military commissariat, the cream-colored walls on Lenin Street are smeared haphazardly with gobs of white paint. Underneath, Mr. Ovchinnikov said, is his painting of a girl wearing the blue and yellow of Ukraine as three missiles fly overhead. Underneath, in large, bold letters: “Stop this!!!”The State of the WarAid for Ukraine: In the latest attempt to buoy Ukraine through a brutal winter, international leaders have announced around 1 billion euros to repair the country’s infrastructure.Avoiding Questions: President Vladimir V. Putin will not hold his annual December news conference. The move comes as Russia’s economy falters and follows a series of military setbacks in Ukraine.Splintered Loyalties: The town of Sviatohirsk, in Ukraine’s east, is divided by where people’s allegiances lie: with Moscow or Kyiv.Brittney Griner’s Release: By detaining the athlete, the Kremlin weaponized pain and got the United States to turn over a convicted arms dealer. Can the same tactic work in the war?After painting over the graffiti, the authorities turned their attention to Mr. Ovchinnikov, fining him 35,000 rubles, about $560, and accusing him of “discrediting the Russian armed forces.”“A fine for the fact that I want peace,” Mr. Ovchinnikov said. “I’m discrediting our military. How disgraceful.”His supporters sent donations to help him cover the fine.Nearby, in the town’s small central park, Mr. Ovchinnikov pointed to a statue of Lenin. It is not unlike those standing in practically every Russian town to this day. “That’s our leader,” he said sarcastically. The statue, he noted with a wry smile, is pointing straight at the voenkomat.In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented separatist movements in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Ovchinnikov drew a Ukrainian flag on the statue’s pedestal. “I didn’t have time to write ‘Glory to Ukraine,’” he said. “They came and picked me up right away.”A World War II memorial in Borovsk. On its back, Mr. Ovchinnikov erected his own memorial dedicated to the repressed.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesAn antiwar painting by Mr. Ovchinnikov that had been vandalized.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesRussia under Vladimir V. Putin has sought to airbrush its history.It prefers, for example, to portray Joseph Stalin as the leader who led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II, and minimize the scale of the crimes the state under his rule committed against its own people. Memorial, a human rights organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for its work chronicling political repression, has been dismantled.In Borovsk, where he moved after retiring from his career as an engineer, Mr. Ovchinnikov is fighting a lonely battle to keep the memory alive.Tucked behind Lenin in the park is a vandalized black stone, a monument to the those who were repressed during the Stalin era. Mr. Ovchinnikov had campaigned for it — but he is the one who vandalized it. He had wanted the memorial to include the names of all those from Borovsk who had been repressed.“I wrote ‘trampled and forgotten,’ and higher on the rock, ‘return their names,’” he said, referring to the idea that he was restoring dignity to the victims, who are currently a nameless and uncounted mass.That, too, was covered up with paint.Nearby, at the center of the park, stands a memorial to those who defended the Soviet Union during World War II. On its large back wall in 2019, Mr. Ovchinnikov erected his own memorial, one dedicated to the repressed. He painted a huge banner with portraits of people who had been shot. “Executed Future,” he called it.“I wrote down the names of only those shot,” he said. “There are 186 of them. But those who met their end in the camps — I should have added them.”As he walked to the front of the memorial, he paused to examine the list of names of the soldiers who died during the war.“For every 100 people who died on the battlefields, 170 were shot by our authorities,” Mr. Ovchinnikov said. “Yes, they have something to hide. But I think that the only reason they don’t want people to know about the scale is that they don’t want people to know what our government is capable of doing.”Farther down the street, he took a piece of charcoal from his pocket and traced four numbers faintly visible under a fresh coat of paint: 1937, the year that Stalin’s repression peaked. “The fact we’re trying to forget our tragedy, our repression, is one of the reasons for what is happening in Ukraine now,” he said.Mr. Ovchinnikov with one of his antiwar paintings that was covered over by the authorities.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesMr. Ovchinnikov painted a dove underneath signs near a store entrance.Nanna Heitmann for The New York TimesMany people feel uncomfortable when confronted with the painful history — and present — and do not welcome Mr. Ovchinnikov’s art.In the town’s central market, an older man pulling a cart stopped in front of a mural of his that was commissioned by the local butcher. It showed an artist holding a large goblet in front of a still life with meat.“If I had my wall defaced like this, I would paint over it,” the man told Mr. Ovchinnikov gruffly.Other residents who appreciate his apolitical art but back the war are rankled by his support for Ukraine.“It was not right to draw that,” said Aleksei, 32, pointing to a mural with sunflowers and another one next to it called “Nostalgia,” which featured a Russian woman and a Ukrainian woman holding hands. “Nostalgia” had been vandalized: The Ukrainian woman’s eyes had been gouged out.“Ukraine is not on our side but against us, and we don’t need Ukraine to exist,” said Aleksei, who declined to give his surname. “They started the war. We didn’t start the war.”Last month, Mr. Ovchinnikov was pelted with snowballs when he was updating some antiwar graffiti by the main road.“First I wrote ‘Z: madness,’” he said, referring to the letter that has become a symbol of support for the invasion. “They painted over it. Then I wrote ‘Z: Shame.’ They painted over it. Then I wrote ‘Z: Fiasco.’”That was in November. Soon after, a major from the intelligence services came to his home to question him.“With the inscription, I had the goal of conveying to the population and guests of the city of Borovsk that the special military operation is a failure and that it must be stopped,” he wrote in his official statement, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war.“I do not repent for what I have done. I do not feel my guilt. I had to do what I did.”“I draw doves, they paint over them,” Mr. Ovchinnikov said about the authorities.Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times More

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      Covid. A Coma. A Stroke. José Parlá Returns From the Edge.

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      After a lengthy recovery, the artist comes back with the most vigorous work he’s made: “It took me a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”DETROIT — During the three months last year that the artist José Parlá was in a medically induced coma after contracting Covid-19, he had vivid dreams that he later found difficult to process: managing a Miami hotel circa 1980 and navigating a kidnapping plot involving his brother and the Hong Kong triads. “I was perceiving these dreams not as dreams but as memories,” he said. “Events that I believed had happened but weren’t real.”The intensity of those visions, experienced unconscious and close to death, are metabolized in Parlá’s new body of work, completed since his recovery, titled “Polarities,” at Library Street Collective, an art gallery here. Seven large-scale paintings on canvas and two on wood, at human scale, can be read as a body scan, and their dense networks of lines radiating outward from a central node can appear arterial, conjuring the intricate workings of the respiratory system, or the firing synapses in the brain.But as personal as they are, they avoid much of the solipsism that characterized artists’ work during the pandemic. Instead they take an expansive, world-historical view, reaching much further back, as Parlá’s work tends to do, to trace the psycho-geographic effect a place, and the memory of it, can have.José Parlá, “Degree,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas, from “Polarities” at Library Street Collective, Detroit.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Resistance,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá, who lives in New York City and whose work is in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the British Museum, first visited Detroit in 2006 not knowing anyone here, simply looking to walk around and take photographs. He returned in 2018, after meeting JJ and Anthony Curis, owners and founders of Library Street Collective, who invited him to witness the changes the city was working through. Parlá decided then to devote a body of work to Detroit, which probably would have debuted in 2020 if not for the pandemic. The idea was further waylaid when Parlá contracted Covid-19 in early 2021, becoming so ill that he was hospitalized, intubated, and put in an induced coma for three months. Halfway through, he suffered a stroke and significant brain bleeding. His doctors told his brother, Rey, they didn’t expect him to survive.“It’s a miracle that I’m here talking to you,” Parlá, 49, told me last month, his voice still a strained rasp from the damage done by the breathing tube, though flying at its usual excited clip. “When I woke up it took a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”Memory and resurrection are both at front of mind here. On a weekday afternoon, the hum of construction drones steadily downtown, the rapid development of the last decade continuing to revive central Detroit from decades of bankruptcy and population flight. A Gucci store is slated to open on a corner where even five years ago the thought of it would be absurd (it still is, though the absurdity now has a different flavor). But just five miles east, entire neighborhoods remain pocked by abandoned homes and ruinous storefronts — tracts of lots distinguishable only by the height of their overgrown weeds. Stretches of its avenues bear scars of Detroit’s dispossession: crumbling brickwork, weatherworn concrete, sun-bleached advertisements seized in time.José Parlá, “Polarity,” 2022. His skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveYou don’t have to be from Detroit to know what this looks like. It’s familiar to anyone who lives in or has moved through places that exist on the periphery, neglected by its center. It’s certainly familiar to Parlá, who absorbs the visual signatures of dilapidation into his paintings, murals and sculpture. Threaded with calligraphy, they read as abstraction but can also be understood as landscapes, or an anthropological excavation of them.He has located these textures around the world — in the Bronx, New York; Naples, Italy; Havana — translating these degraded environments into deeply felt portraits of human movements. Like Julie Mehretu, Parlá challenges the historical parameters of abstraction, but he works in a realist style, a focus that goes back to his earliest days of painting burners — large, elaborate wall works with aerosol — in Miami and Atlanta in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In terms of visual information, the wall, for Parlá, is of as crucial importance as the line or brush stroke or any other mark.“Polarities” is the first body of work he has completed and exhibited since his hospitalization. In its mere existence, it defies his doctors’ prognosis that he would likely not be able to paint again. Not that his recovery was easy. Known for his dynamic style of mural making — leaping off scaffolding while keeping his brush in contact with the canvas to achieve continuous, loping arcs, as he did for “One: Union of the Senses” (2015), a 90-foot mural in the lobby of One World Trade Center, in Manhattan — Parlá found himself barely able to walk a few steps without being exhausted.“Eventually one of the doctors brought me watercolors and watercolor paper, and I was able to do these tiny landscape paintings, and that really helped me to feel, ‘OK, I can still color and I can still make lines,’ but I had atrophy — my brother and one of the doctors would help me grasp brushes or pens because my hands didn’t have the strength,” he said. By the time he was discharged, in 2021, Parlá had been inside a hospital in New York for five months.José Parlá, “Detroit / La Habana,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on wood. “Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him,” said Michael Rooks, a curator, adding that “they bear witness to history” like segments of the Berlin Wall.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveThe day Parlá returned to his studio happened to be July 11, 2021, when huge anti-government protests erupted in Cuba, the first there in 27 years. Parlá, who was born in Miami to Cuban émigré parents, grew up moving between the United States mainland and Puerto Rico with an early awareness of political strife. Since 2020 he has worked with the artist-led activist group the Wide Awakes.“It brought me back to the protests we were all part of in New York in 2020 and everything we were fighting for,” he said. “You saw an opposite side of that in Cuba where young artists were fighting for their freedom of expression. It was very emotional for me.” Detroit and Cuba represented, in his view, the extremes of capitalism and communism, systems that have colored Parlá’s life since childhood.“One of my aunts was imprisoned in Cuba in the 1970s when a lot of political prisoners were given 10-, 15-year sentences,” he said. “It was always part of the culture; you knew you couldn’t say certain things. That hasn’t changed.” Indeed, one of the first places Parlá journeyed after his recovery was Cuba, in January 2022, and he returned in June. There he spoke with artists who have decided to remain, and who carefully make artworks to evade censorship and punishment.José Parlá, “Breath,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Position,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá was concerned he wouldn’t be able to paint with the energy and agility that has come to characterize his output. But the work in “Polarities” is at points the most vigorous he’s ever made. They thrum with riotous color and restive movement, the paint thick and drippy in places, rippling and gouged in others. In their fields you can locate any number of churning cataclysms — the 1967 Detroit Riots; the highway system that displaced Black neighborhoods years earlier; waves of displacement and migration.There’s a sense of all the anger and frustration coursing through the paint, an accelerative thrust that feels impatient, as if time is running out. Parlá worked on the canvases simultaneously, arranged side by side, mixing colors without stopping. “It’s the concept of oneness, of interdependence, how we all rely on each other,” he said. “The paintings rely on each other to be a good body of work.” They are paintings that are alive to political resistance, but also resistance to death.That quality of refusal can be traced to Parlá’s beginnings in art making. In many ways his mature work internalizes the graffiti tradition: its style, of course, but also its embrace of language (the work in “Polarities,” as in much of Parlá’s oeuvre, is layered with calligraphic glyphs and snatches of writing); its understanding of the way cities function as modes of communication; and, potently, its capacity to antagonize power structures.Still, Parlá chafes at what he refers to as “the G-word.” He often invokes the storied writer Phase 2, a mentor, who suggested that referring to masterful forms of color and expression as “graffiti” was as inadequate as “calling a meteor a pebble.”José Parlá in downtown Detroit, where he found inspiration for his exhibition “Polarities.”Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him, and I think that’s where his practice as a writer, as a painter, these calligraphic, gestural marks have meaning,” said Michael Rooks, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, and the curator of the 2014 exhibition “José Parlá: Segmented Realities,” Parlá’s first major museum show.“You can trace that impulse back to ancient wall writing,” Rooks continued. “If we think about other objects that evoke a similar social and cultural upheaval and transformation, like segments of the Berlin Wall, for example, they bear witness to history, with marks inscribed in their surface that had specific meanings for the viewer, for the maker, that may be lost.” Rooks considers Parlá a realist in this sense “because he is excavating our own experience” and invoking objects that are familiar, “that have layers of history.”Parlá’s skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape, the things that accumulate over time and are eventually lost to it.Unsurprisingly, the restlessness that characterizes his paintings also translates to his schedule. He’s already at work on his next projects, presentations at the Brooklyn Museum and at Gana Art, in Seoul, as well as curating shows in Istanbul and Italy. Perhaps somewhat expectedly, he rejects that term, too: “I wouldn’t say a curator,” he laughed. “More like an anti-systematic operative.”José Parlá: PolaritiesThrough Aug. 24, Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, (313) 600-7443; lscgallery.com. More

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      Peeling Paint in Hong Kong Reveals Work of Newly Relevant ‘King’

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      When he was alive, the graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, or the “King of Kowloon,” was considered peculiar and personal. In a radically changed city, his mostly vanished art now has a political charge.HONG KONG — Often shirtless in summer, smelling of sweat and ink, the aggrieved artist wrote incessantly, and everywhere: on walls, underpasses, lamp posts and traffic light control boxes.He covered public spaces in Hong Kong with expansive jumbles of Chinese characters that announced his unshakable belief that much of the Kowloon Peninsula rightfully belonged to his family.During his lifetime, the graffiti artist, Tsang Tsou-choi, was a ubiquitous figure, well-known for his eccentric campaign that struck most as a peculiar personal mission, not a political rallying cry.But Hong Kong has become a very different place since Mr. Tsang died in 2007, and his work — once commonly spotted, but now largely vanished from the streetscape — has taken on a new resonance in a city where much political expression has been stamped out by a sweeping campaign against dissent since 2020.“In his lifetime, particularly early on, people thought he was completely crazy,” said Louisa Lim, author of “Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,” a new book that examines Mr. Tsang’s legacy. “Even at the time that he died no one was really interested in the content or the political message of his work. But actually, he was talking about these Hong Kong preoccupations long before other people were — territory, sovereignty, dispossession and loss.”When a decades-old work surfaced earlier this year, it started drawing a crowd to a setting that could hardly be more mundane: a concrete railway bridge, built over a roadway and adorned with little besides a registration number and a warning against graffiti.The bridge sits near a bird market and a sports stadium on Boundary Street, a road that marks the edge of the territory ceded by the Qing dynasty to the British in 1860 after the Second Opium War. It is covered in gray paint, some of which flaked away this spring — exactly how remains a mystery — to reveal a palimpsest of Mr. Tsang’s work from several eras of painting at one of his favorite sites.Taking a photo of the newly discovered work. “There are very few King of Kowloon works left in Hong Kong, and now, those that are before our eyes are precious,” When In Doubt, an artist collective, wrote in celebration of the discovery. Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesLam Siu-wing, a Hong Kong artist, said he happened across the Boundary Street work while out for an evening walk in late March.“I thought the old Hong Kong was saying hello again,” he said.News of the discovery began to spread, with When In Doubt, an artist collective that Mr. Lam belongs to, describing his find as a rare treasure. The group noted that it’s one of the earliest artistic creations to prod discussion of an essential and increasingly pressing question in Hong Kong: Who does urban space belong to?The Latest on China: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 6China’s economy stumbles. More