Artist Spotlight / Contemporary Relevance
A renewed look at Ivan Plusch, Olga Tobreluts, and Jean-Daniel Lorieux
This season, Matney Gallery invites you to engage with three visionary artists whose practices open up new ways of seeing and understanding a world in constant flux. Through diverse media—painting, photography, digital art, and lens-based imagery—these artists investigate themes of transformation, memory, and constructed identity. Their work resists easy interpretation, instead offering layered, emotionally charged engagements with history and cultural narrative.
In presenting Ivan Plusch, Olga Tobreluts, and Jean-Daniel Lorieux together, we highlight not only their individual strengths but also their shared ability to collapse time, genre, and material boundaries. Each artist draws from distinct traditions—post-Soviet figuration, digital reappropriation, and high-gloss fashion editorial—to reflect on what endures, what shifts, and what must be reimagined. who explore memory, myth, and media—raising urgent questions about perception, storytelling, and legacy in our digital age.
Ivan Plusch
Episode 5
2011
Acrylic on canvas
58×58 in
Ivan Plusch
Born in St. Petersburg in 1981, Ivan Plusch trained at prestigious institutions—Stieglitz Academy, Roerich Art School, and PRO ARTE—and co-founded the influential Nepokorennie (“Unconquered”) collective. Working at the boundary between existence and elusion, Plusch builds narratives in paint that both reveal and erase—a reflection of identity destabilized by history and technology.
A focal point in his exhibition at Matney Gallery is Episode 5 (2011), the final work in a series that features a figure dissolving into drips, Cyrillic glyphs, and falling numerical code. The canvas—painted in muted grayscale—captures a moment of collapse or emergence, where the human and informational intersect in liminal space. Complementing this is his Effect series (2018), exhibited in Matney’s Current Midtown and Tradition shows. These large-format canvases continue his signature “sideways dripping,” with flowing pigment dissolving figuration into abstract fields—a visceral metaphor for memory’s fragility and the destabilization of form.
We’re grateful to Gray Bowditch, whose early and thoughtful support has helped introduce Plusch’s work to U.S. collectors and institutions aligned with Matney Gallery’s mission.
Plusch’s paintings and installations have attracted international attention, with exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, State Hermitage, and Russian Museum. Matney Gallery’s ongoing engagement with his work reaffirms our commitment to artists who reconstruct historical and aesthetic conventions via material experimentation and psychological depth.
Ivan Plusch
Effect 5
2011
Acrylic on canvas
51 × 78 in
Olga Tobreluts
Russian, b. 1970
Modernization I, 2002-printed 2012
Kodak Metallic Print Edition
47 1/5 × 55 1/10 in
119.9 × 140 cm
Olga Tobreluts
Nimfa
2018
Master Edition 1/3 copy 10
Stereo-Vario
40 Inch Diameter
Olga Tobreluts
Born in Murino (Leningrad Oblast) in 1970, Olga Tobreluts is a renowned multidisciplinary artist working across photography, video, painting, sculpture, and digital media. She gained early recognition for her digitally manipulated photographic works and postmodern reimaginings of classical iconography. More recently, Tobreluts has developed a striking series of lenticular pieces that explore perception, power, and the fragmentation of identity. These dynamic works shift as the viewer moves, revealing multiple layers of meaning embedded in each image.
Her Hearts series (c. 2014–15) marked a shift toward painterly abstraction. Large-scale works like Heart II (78″ × 74″) distill emotional complexity into geometric form, using saturated color and visual symmetry to bridge classical composition with a digital-age sensibility. The Hearts were prominently featured in both the Current Midtown presentation and the Tradition exhibition in Newport News, offering a tactile and contemplative counterpoint to Tobreluts's lens- and screen-based work.
We again extend gratitude to Gray Bowditch, whose support has been instrumental in presenting Tobreluts’s work to Matney Gallery’s U.S. audiences.
Tobreluts’s work appears in major collections including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, State Russian Museum, MoMA, Victoria & Albert, and Ludwig Museum Budapest—underscoring her role in shaping post-digital visual discourse through both media-driven and painterly forms. including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, State Russian Museum, MoMA, Victoria & Albert, and Ludwig Museum Budapest—underscoring her role in shaping post-digital visual discourse through both media-driven and painterly forms. including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, State Russian Museum, MoMA, Victoria & Albert, and Ludwig Museum Budapest—underscoring her role in shaping post-digital visual discourse through both media-driven and painterly forms. including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, State Russian Museum, MoMA, Victoria & Albert, and Ludwig Museum Budapest—underscoring her role in shaping post-digital visual discourse through both media-driven and painterly forms.
Olga Tobreluts
Heart 2, 2014-2015
Oil on Canvas
77 9/10 × 74 in | 197.9 × 188 cm
Olga Tobreluts
Antinous
2019
Master Edition 1/3 copy 10
Stereo-Vario
40 Inch Diameter
Jean-Daniel Lorieux
“Master and Margarita” M/M-8
Staheeva building 14/1, Novaya Basmannaya, Moscow
2008, printed 2011
Photographic archival print
47.2 x 31.5 inches (framed)
Edition 1/20
Jean-Daniel Lorieux
Born in Paris in 1937, Jean-Daniel Lorieux began his career at Studio Harcourt in 1964 before earning acclaim as a fashion and editorial photographer. Influenced by his wartime service in Algeria, he pursued beauty, glamour, and optimism in sharp contrast to conflict. Lorieux is celebrated for luminous, high-contrast compositions—tropical settings, bold color, stylized sensuality—and for portraits of Claudia Schiffer, Isabelle Adjani, Jacques Chirac, and Prince Albert of Monaco. His Master and Margarita series (Isabelle Adjani, Moscow, 2008) has been exhibited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and featured in FotoFest Houston in 2012. His work is held in collections including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Lorieux’s inclusion at Matney Gallery is part of our collaborations with Deborah Colton, a champion of photographers based in Houston, New York, and beyond—strengthening our connection with the international photo community and expanding access for collectors to Lorieux’s theatrical, glamorous archive. Through narrative elegance and staged glamour, Lorieux offers a visual archive of beauty and theatrical history.
Jean-Daniel Lorieux
“Master and Margarita,” Pontius Pillate, M/M-13
Pushkin Museum, Moscow
2008, printed 2011
Photographic archival print
47.2 x 31.5 inches (framed)
Edition 1/20
Rethinking Reality, Memory, and Legacy
Together, Plusch, Tobreluts, and Lorieux invite a deeper engagement with how we perceive, remember, and shape cultural narratives. Ivan Plusch uses flowing, disrupted surfaces to evoke the instability of form and time—his paintings hover between clarity and disintegration. Olga Tobreluts’s lenticular works and Hearts paintings shift as viewers engage them, creating layered experiences that challenge our assumptions about image, form, and truth. Jean‑Daniel Lorieux blends theatricality with high‑gloss elegance, staging scenes where glamour and history merge in enduring visual fictions.
At Matney Gallery, we view these artists as essential voices in the ongoing conversation between private collecting and institutional storytelling. Their work doesn't merely reflect our time—it helps us question and redefine it. Positioned at the intersection of painting, digital media, and photography, their practices belong not only in collections, but in the evolving archives of museums shaping our cultural memory.