No animal appears more often in Mongolian painting than the horse. It is transport, wealth, companion and emblem all at once — and in the collection it arrives in every register: the tight realism of a Kazakh eagle hunter on a snow ridge, the loose ink gesture of a herd at dusk, the pure abstraction of a mane dissolved into colour.
One motif, many hands
What is striking across the collection is how little the horse is treated as cliché. Each painter meets it differently. For some it is a study in anatomy and light; for others a way into memory and landscape; for the abstractionists it is barely a horse at all — an excuse for movement, weight and speed on the canvas.
Follow the motif through the collection and you get a portrait of Mongolian painting itself: rooted in a shared world, but pulling in a hundred individual directions.