No animal appears more often in Mongolian painting than the horse, and no motif is easier to get wrong. Mongolia counts more horses than people; a child of the countryside is in the saddle by five or six. So the horse arrives on canvas not as an emblem reached for, but as a fact remembered — transport, wealth, companion, and, in the old belief, something more: khiimori, the wind-horse, the banner-symbol of a person’s inner strength and fortune that still flies on prayer flags and sits in everyday speech. When a Mongolian painter paints a horse, they are often painting a state of the soul.
One motif, many hands
The collection holds the motif in every register, and the differences between hands are the real subject. In the Mongolian-style works, horses carry queens and hunters with the flat, jewelled patience of the old zurag painters — Khosbayar Narankhuu’s Queen With Two Horses treats horse, rider and gold ground as one woven ornament. In the realist canvases, the horse is labour and weather: eagle hunters on snow ridges, herds braced against the coming dark. And in the abstractions it is barely a horse at all — an excuse for weight, direction and speed, a diagonal that remembers it was once an animal.
The master of the spare stroke
One painter in the collection has spent a lifetime on little else. Chimeddorj Shagdarjav, born in 1954 in Töv province to a family of herders, learned to ride at five and to draw soon after; he is now a State Laureate of Mongolia, collected across Europe and Asia, and regarded by many as the finest living painter of the horse anywhere. His ink sheets — the collection holds a long suite of his Black And White series — say in four strokes what anatomy textbooks need pages for: a lowered neck, a shifted hip, the exact slack of a resting hind leg. The economy is not minimalism for its own sake. It is the knowledge of someone who has watched horses since before he could write, compressed until only movement is left.
Follow the motif through the collection and you get a portrait of Mongolian painting itself: rooted in one shared world, pulling in a hundred individual directions — and always, somewhere under the paint, moving.
