Curated by Vladislav Sludskiy
Assistant Curator: Amir Shakar
Аrt manager: Mila Pankratova
Technical director: Eduard Tsege

Takyr (from Turkic - "smooth, even, bare") - a relief form formed by the drying of saline soils (takyr soils) in deserts and semi-deserts. Takyr is characterized by drying cracks that form a characteristic pattern on clayey soil.

Craquelure - cracks in the paint layer or varnish in a painting or any other paint coating (for example, on vintage cars). Craquelures often form because the fresh top layer of paint dehydrates due to the absorption of water by the insufficiently dried underlying layer.

Takyr - Craquelure is an exhibition about a journey with an unhappy ending, about cracks that form over time in the paint layer of paintings that are forgotten, and their strange visual resemblance to dried clay soil. Some of the artworks included in the exhibition, such as "Road," "Warm Lake Shore," and "High Voltage Conductor" were involved in the accident. The rest consists of abstract paintings by Moldakul Narymbetov Takyr and Takyr 2, as well as his triptych Takyr, made in the late 1990s.

Kazakhstan's school of painting, still carrying the codes of socialist realism, consists mainly of figurative works, so the artist's early experiments with abstraction compel one to look for an alternative source of knowledge about form and color. Most likely, one of such sources for Narymbetov was a famous non-artist – nature itself. Textures, chaos, fractal geometry, rhythm create a certain space of painting that would not be informed by the city or tradition as such, but rather would think of itself as a continuation of a journey through an anti-city: steppes, small villages with cob architecture, a lamppost as the only axis on the horizon.

We have decided not to restore the works on dense cardboard that the artist's estate received in 2022 shortly after returning the other works from the Nevzorov Museum, which were damaged in the accident. With the consent of the Narymbetov family, the artist's estate transferred six paintings to the museum's collection, some of which were also damaged in the accident and are currently being restored in the museum's building.