Description:
Visual Description: This vertical oil painting depicts a construction site in a mountainous landscape. In the foreground, a woman stands in profile on the left side, facing right. She wears a light blue sleeveless shirt. Her dark hair is pulled back into a neat bun, with bangs and side pieces slightly covering her face. She holds a yellow metal pole on her right shoulder, supporting it by its topside with her arm raised to her shoulder-level. Her left arm rests at her side with only the bent elbow visible behind her torso. Behind her, on a lower plane, stands a man in a white shirt and a red construction helmet holding a brown briefcase. He faces the viewer, but his right side is covered by the woman's silhouette.
The construction site spreads across the middle ground. Four cranes and five trucks are positioned throughout the pale terrain. Many small figures of workers are scattered among the structures and equipment.
The background is dominated by massive mountain slopes that fill the upper two-thirds of the canvas. A river rendered in white meanders diagonally throughout the vally across the midground of the canvas. The mountains give an effect of “wrapping-around” the landscape, having steeper slopes on the left-most quarter of the image and becoming less steep to the right of this point. The mountains are rendered in layers of rust-orange, brown, gray-blue, and ochre. Diagonal brushstrokes follow the contours of the slopes. The peaks rise toward the top edge, where a pale yellow-gray sky occupies the uppermost portion. Light comes from above, illuminating the upper slopes and creating shadows below.
Label Text:
A Russian-born artist of German descent, Karl Tanpeter is recognized for bringing the landscapes and cultures of Kyrgyzstan, a fellow Soviet republic he visited frequently, into Ukrainian art. This painting most likely depicts the construction of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Station, a massive undertaking that transformed the region’s economy. To this day, it supplies forty percent of Kyrgyzstan’s electricity. Like other hydroelectric
plants built in Central Asia during the Soviet era, Toktogul became a symbol of Soviet technological prowess and enabled rapid industrial development in what had been predominantly rural territory. Tanpeter’s landscape reflects a distinctly colonial
mode of seeing nature, which was widespread in Soviet visual culture. This perspective glorifies human intervention and portrays nature as something to be mastered and transformed through labor and technology.
MT, 2025
Tags:
painting; construction; power; workers; labor; mountains Subjects:
Mountains; Painting; Labor; Canvas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2020.12 |
