For a few weeks this autumn, the halls of the National Art Gallery of Mongolia held a quiet, color-drenched conversation between a country and the man who has spent a lifetime painting it. Bum Art, the solo exhibition of L.Bumandorj, a laureate of the Union of Mongolian Artists, closed on September 28. Its reach across decades, from the steppe to the smoke-stained ger areas of Ulaanbaatar, will stay with those who walked its rooms.
The exhibition was rare in its construction. Masterworks from the gallery’s own collection hung beside pieces from the artist’s private holdings and his newest experiments, so that visitors could follow a career in a single circuit, watching a hand and an eye mature side by side.
Nowhere was that maturity clearer than in the wide canvas of a winter pasture. A sky of pale butter yellow, brushed with fine horizontal strokes, stretched over blue-violet hills that seemed to glow from within. A few horses grazed on frozen ground and two gers sat far off, wisps of smoke rising from them. Then, at the right edge, the composition turned. A single horse looked into the frame, its head enormous and dark, its russet coat built from thick, restless daubs of paint. The distant herd and the near portrait held each other in tension. One was the vastness of the land and the other the intimacy of a gaze, and together they made a landscape that felt watched as much as painted.
The horse returned elsewhere in a very different mood. In a still life of almost architectural severity, two wooden horse figures stood on pale and cobalt blocks against a black ground, above a floor of saturated red. The larger figure, in deep bottle green, faced the viewer in profile with the dignity of a monument. Its smaller russet companion perched on the block above like a distant echo. Here the beloved symbol of the nomad became a studied object, stripped of grass and wind and considered as form. Beside it hung a canvas of flattened, carved-looking figures and rock-art animals in indigo, rust and ivory, a nod to the ancient stone markers and petroglyphs that lie scattered across the Mongolian landscape. The past was not quoted so much as absorbed, its forms turned into a modern pictorial language.
L.Bumandorj’s gift for the city was just as striking. One long panorama followed a caravan of laden Bactrian camels as it crossed an ochre plain in front of a hillside crowded with houses. Fences in mustard, teal and rose formed a bright band across the middle ground, and above them rooftops climbed the slope in a dense mosaic of angular planes. The riders were small and unhurried, the camels drawn with a gently caricatured elegance. The canvas held two Mongolias in one frame, the ancient trade route and the improvised settlement, walking in step. It neither mourned the old nor celebrated the new. It simply insisted that they now share the same ground.
A second, even longer work, framed in antique gold and set in four joined sections, brought the same district into winter. Snow settled on sagging roofs and a blue night sky pressed down over the huddled houses. Timber fences, painted in weathered browns and reds, ran in uneven lines through the drifts. At the far left a lone figure led a pale horse along the road, a small human gesture inside a great cold. The palette was restrained but the surface was full of warmth, in the yellow window frames and the thick, sculpted texture of the snow. Under the gallery spotlights the work read almost as a frieze, a portrait of a city’s edge rendered with real tenderness.
Elsewhere the exhibition turned boldly abstract. One tall canvas erupted in interlocking planes of pink, orange, emerald and violet, with feathered, shell-like forms drifting across a black field, part still life and part stained-glass fantasy. Its neighbour was a hushed and clever counterpoint, an open window framed by teal curtains and a heavy blue border. Through the opening lay a sunlit green hillside dotted with tiny houses and gers, a whole nomadic horizon compressed into a doorway. It was perhaps the most poetic image in the show, a reminder that the steppe is often something we look toward from inside, through a frame of memory.
This range comes naturally from L.Bumandorj’s training. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where he studied graphics and book art, he carries a printmaker’s discipline into his painting. It shows in his firm outlines, his layered planes of colour and his sure sense of design. His career has been equally devoted to others. He served as Chief Artist at the State Stamp Office, then as Director of the College of Fine Arts and Director of the School of Fine Arts at the Mongolian National University of Arts and Culture, shaping a generation of Mongolian artists along the way.
