Echoes of the Silk Road: Bobur Ismailov’s Theatrical Canvases
Artist Bobur Ismailov is fascinated by textiles and costumes. His paintings resemble stage sets – empty houses or quiet courtyards behind city walls, inhabited by characters in ornate headdresses and voluminous skirts. The Uzbekistan artist himself calls them “symbolic narratives.”
His themes are loneliness and social isolation, but his protagonists also have fierce independence. His heroines—and it is mostly heroines—are often seen lost in thought by a window, alone, in darkness. Their profiles are reminiscent of an ancient fresco. Yet the exuberance of the fabric in the painting is distinctly modern, from geometric patterns to spring florals and rich oriental hues. Each painting is a tumult of shapes, forms, and colours.
Ismailov admires traditional, hand-crafted Uzbek textiles - Suzanis embroidered in silk or cotton with bright motifs, including irises, tulips, sun, moon, and the flowing Central Asian ikat designs. “Here in Uzbekistan, we have many different artists and painters who came to Central Asia from Europe and Russia before Communist times,” he says.
But he prefers an element of fantasy in his work. “Maybe they are not historically correct,” he acknowledges. “If we speak about the style of costumes and design of patterns in my paintings, I am always destroying tradition. For me, it is not important to reproduce an original historical school or style of dress because this is not a place to show museum examples. It’s more important to show a harmony of styles. A mix of East and West-flavoured patterns, including Europe, Central Asia, East Persia.”
Many of his surrealist paintings feature theatrical masks, symbols, and ornaments. Ismailov cites Giotto, Magritte, de Chirico, and Italian commedia dell'arte as key influences. “The square of the canvas is like my theatre. And the heroes are like actors,” he says, adding that the process of making a painting is as gripping as developments in a stage play. “For me, every finished painting is an incomplete theatrical performance which has its unanswered questions.”
The same faces sometimes recur in his work. Ismailov’s grown-up daughters inspire him, though these are not intended as real-life portraits. Instead, they are “deeply psychological” studies. “Because every actor, when they start the scene, are putting on the mask of the character they play, from the very beginning of ancient Greek theatre,” he says.
His father, Abdurakhim Ismailov, is a famous Uzbek cinematographer. His sister is the film director and artist Saodat Ismailova. As children, they grew up in a creative environment, spending a lot of time in their father’s film studio and meeting his friends who were cartoonists, artists, and filmmakers.
Ismailov loves oil paint for its versatility and meditative quality. He often takes weeks to complete a piece, building it up layer by layer. His colour palette features reds, violets, and the hidden energy of ochre, olive, and amber.
His work is in theatre and cinema, painting, design, book graphics, and video art. While in London, he recently visited the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Design Museum. But he is also fascinated by biblical stories and the philosophy of the Eastern poets. “I take inspiration from Sufism in Islamic religion,” he says. “I think the Bible or Koran and other great books, we don't need to see them as a history of humanity. Instead, we must see their stories parallel to the modern world.”
Ismailov was born in 1973 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he lives and works today. “The artist Hieronymus Bosch sparked my imagination after my father gave me a big book of his work,” he says. He studied at the Benkov Republican Art College from 1987-90 and graduated from the Uyghur State Institute of Arts in 1996.
He started out working on set designs and costumes. His early paintings were carnivalesque, featuring fairground booths, street circus performers, and musicians. Today, he specialises in simple, almost monotone canvases with subtle colour nuances.
His works reinterpret ancient myths or classical set-ups, such as mother and child or the woman in a mirror. He has produced his version of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) and the famous Velasquez painting Las Meninas (1656).
Sometimes, Ismailov’s characters seem to be tipped upside down or thrown out of the picture frame, reflecting the challenges of modern life. “The world is changing every year, every day, every month, and we see many, very strange collapses,” he says as we discuss the war in Ukraine and tensions between Israel and Gaza. The former saddens him greatly because Ukrainians and Russians were once brothers and sisters.
He also feels that COVID has biblical parallels. “The world stops. Everywhere is closed,” he says. “Flights, trains, stop. The streets are empty. And everyone is alone in this world. Like our psychological boxes, we all stay in our houses and look out of our small windows, waiting to see what happens next.”
He found it a tremendous creative time, he says with a sigh. He had no distractions from painting. “Aloneness is an existential state,” he says. “We come into this world alone. And we're going from this world alone.”
To illustrate, in Everyday Still Life, a couple is separated by a table on which their entire household routine is piled up. They are deeply alone, even if together. The Last Letter features a woman in a modern dress trying in vain to write an important letter, her table covered in domestic objects and fabrics.
Ismailov’s works are in public collections, including The Fine Art Gallery Of Uzbekistan and The House of Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. However, as he explains, he posts a new painting on Instagram every week, using social media as an archive rather than for commercial purposes.
He still teaches once a week and mentors young artists. German publisher Verlag Hermann Schmidt will publish a monograph on his work in March.
Ismailov is also prolific – he’s finished 50 paintings in six months. But he never makes copies. “I do every painting with my heart,” he says simply. “I try to start and finish with big love.”
Written by Liz Hoggard: lizhoggard@hotmail.com
Further Information:
Artist Website: Bobur Ismailov:
Email: boburism@gmail.com