Abstractions of Gorky Park and of memories and emotions in Second Life

If I had to say where I felt most alive in my life, or name the place I long for most, or the one I would want to visit again, the answer is: Moscow.

So notes artist and Second life resident Kirjat Umarov in introducing his exhibition The Autumn Sun at Gorky Park and other Stories, which opened at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGOLand & Galleries on July 21, 2026.

This is a very personal collection of pieces, centred on a celebration of Gorky Park, which Kirjat notes he has been able to visit in both in spring and winter whilst in Moscow, but never in autumn. Thus within this exhibition we have original art which starts from the idea of imagining Gorky Park in the months of autumn, and which broadens into so much more.

This is not, however, a series of “traditional” paintings of landscapes directly reflecting the park and its physical structures as we might see them (photos of which can be found in one corner of the exhibition space). They are abstract in nature, suggesting through their use colour – the yellows and golds of autumn, the pale blues of colder autumnal sky, the greys and darker colours of autumn’s wetter moments.

At the same time, the colours are a reflection of memories of Gorky Park and Kirjat’s life as a whole; the warmer, bright shades representing happier times, the darker colours hinting a times apart or times of sadder thoughts. Within several of the pieces are blocky forms, silhouetted outlines: a church, suggestions of a city’s skyline. They serve both as echoes of the city and nation in which the park sits, and of those more personal memories and emotions.

Thus, within all of the pieces lay – as Kirjat calls them – “painted memories”, real or imagined, both from his own experiences and of emotions that might be felt on seeing a familiar place but dressed in the colours of a season for the first time. In this way, they draw us into them and interpret them, gently putting our imaginations to work as they provoke the senses. They create snippets of stories which might be shaped by our own emotions and memories to produce new stories; stories which are not necessarily bound to Gorky Park or Mother Russia. The paintings simply invite us to drift through the libraries of our own memories of places visited, times remembered, times missed, and the seasonal colours of emotion and imagine.

An engaging selection of original physical world art.

Slurl Details

• IMAGOLand & Galleries (Desert Sands, rated: Moderate)