Entelechy of expressionism in contemporary fine arts: Maria Suvorova’s exposition «More than theatre»

The research material is a series of paintings (2015-2024) from the exhibition of the contemporary Russian artist Maria Suvorova “More than a Theatre” presented in the Orenburg Regional Museum of Fine Arts. This article expands on the semantic palette of individual paintings by M. Suvorova and partially characterizes the features of the author’s technique. The author of the article makes assumptions regarding the traditions of expressionist painting and graphics (E. Nolde, E.L. Kirchner, E. Heckel, M. Pechstein, F. Bleyl), which can be traced in the creative manner of M. Suvorova, despite the fact that reviews of her paintings previously spoke only about the Italian metaphysicians. The study ends with the conclusion that the entelechy of expressionism, thanks to its “magic and mystery that cannot be trivialized,” is still fully realized in contemporary fine art. And on the example of the considered paintings, the aesthetics of expressionism, this "guest from the Gothic", which absorbed both the Baroque and Romantic traditions, is associated with the most sacred nature of the Theatre, the Dionysian and Apollonian beginning of art as such and with the consciousness of the artist-painter, in which these beginnings are refracted. Research methods: the research selected hermeneutic, cognitive-discursive, as well as content analysis of visual material.