- Year
- 1980
- Technique
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 31×40 cm
- Status
- In the Artist's Estate
This image originates from one of Petr Maltsev's earliest childhood memories. In 1931, during the forced resettlement of his family, soldiers confiscated their horse and young foal for a collective farm. The animal soon died - exhausted and neglected, harnessed with equipment that did not belong to it. The event remained deeply engraved in the artist's memory from the age of seven.
Painted nearly fifty years later, the work carries that memory without sentimentality. The foal stands alone on a stony, barren field - not soft earth, but hard and unwelcoming ground. Its legs are still thin, its posture uncertain, yet it holds its place. Wind moves through the mane. The sky offers no shelter.
The animal does not flee. It turns toward the viewer with a stillness that feels neither innocent nor resigned - simply present, exposed, enduring.
Maltsev does not illustrate the past. He distills it into a single figure: small against an open world, standing on ground that gives nothing, yet standing still.
