Leonid Sokov - Nonconformism

Leonid Sokov  (1941 – 2018 ) was a Russian nonconformist artist and sculptor. He primarily lived and worked in New York City.

Sokov was born in Mikhalevo in the Tver region, Russia in 1941 and graduated from the Stroganov Institute now called the Moscow School of Art and Industry, in 1969. He emigrated to the United States in 1980. "Leonid Sokov is seen as one of the most brilliant representatives of Sots Art. Sokov uses Soviet symbols in combination with the traditions of popular folklore, creating objects coarsely carved out of wood or wrought from metal, which look similar to wooden toys. The work is often cracked or chipped, the wooden pieces fit together poorly and are painted coarsely, giving it the rough image of a handmade item. The artist often uses combinations of popular myths and forms from the East and West, like portraits of Stalin with Marilyn Monroe, the image of the hammer and sickle turning into a dollar sign, or a “Marching” Giacometti across from a bronze Lenin, in his work. This ironic view allows Sokov not only to lower the levels of aggression in the usual collection of Soviet symbols, but also to try and find their similarities with their antitheses: the symbols of western pop-art."(saatchigallery.com)

In 2001 he represented Russia at the Venice Biennale. He participated in the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea.

In 2012, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art  honored the artist's 70th birthday with a major retrospective and publication on the artist's career and work

Vladimir Yankilevsky - Russian Contemporary Art

Vladimir Borisovich Yankilevsky (February 15, 1938, Moscow – January 4, 2018, Paris) was a Russian artist known mostly for his participation in the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement of the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps his most famous works are his triptychs, works that are difficult to classify, occupying a unique middle ground between painting, and sculpture, similar in some ways to Rauschenberg's combines. On the most basic level, these works use disorienting, often nightmarish imagery to paint a picture of restrictive mental states associated with daily life in the Soviet Union, and with the human condition in general. He is also known for having participated in the Manezh Art Exhibit of 1962, during which Nikita Khrushchev famously chastised the Nonconformist Art Movement as degenerate. Yankilevsky last lived in Paris, France with his wife Rimma.Wikipedia

Tachisme and abstract painting Andre Lanskoy

Andre Lanskoy (31 March 1902 – 24 August 1976) was a Russian painter and printmaker who worked in France. He is associated with the School of Paris and Tachisme, an abstract painting movement that began during the 1940s.
He was born in Moscow. After 1905, the family moved to St. Petersburg, the capital in 1909. In 1918, he moved to Kiev where he painted his first paintings. During the Russian Civil War he fought in the Tsarist White Army. After an injury he moved to Constantinople and in 1921, he went to Paris. Recalling his arrival in the French capital, Lanskoy said: "Literally in the first night I started to paint and I haven’t stopped since." In Paris, he met Serge Poliakoff and later Nicolas de Staël.

 Lanskoy spent a lot of time at museums and was influenced by James Ensor’s and Vincent van Gogh’s use of color. In 1923, he participated in his first group exhibitions of Russian painters at the La Licorne Gallery in Paris. Wilhelm Uhde discovered Lanskoy’s paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1924 and became a collector of his works in the years that followed. In 1925, Lanskoy had a solo exhibition and his works were acquired by museums and important private collectors. After 1937, his paintings began a transition towards abstraction and he studied both Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

 After 1942, he painted only abstract works. The interaction of form and color became the major theme running through his oeuvre: "Even though every brushstroke represents for itself a transformed reality, it receives its true meaning in the context of surrounding shades of color." In 1944, Lanskoy exhibited at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery in Paris where he met Nicolas de Staël. In 1948, he showed at the Louis Carré Gallery and in 1951 at the Galerie Jacques Dubourg. The Tooth and Sons Gallery showed his work in 1953 and The Loeb Gallery in New York City followed in 1959. In 1962, he began to work on a large project of original prints and collages to accompany Nikolai Gogol’s novel Diary of a Madman. He worked for fourteen years until his death on this project resulting in 150 collages and 80 lithographs. In 1966 he had an exhibition at the Museé Galliéra, Paris. The Neue Galerie in Zürich held an exhibition in 1969. Lanskoy died on 24 August 1976 in Paris. The Aras Gallery collected the extensive Diary of a Madman series of prints and staged a major posthumous exhibition in 1989.Wikipedia

Daria Kotyukh

Daria Kotyukh’s style is both graphical and spare. She aspires to perfection in the composition and the transformation of her drawings by employing the strict minimum of means to reveal the depth of the sand-stories on one hand and, on the other, convey all the beauty of the Sand as a material.
Graduated from the Saint Petersburg N. Roerich Art School as well as the Stieglitz Art and Industry Academy, she is the Winner of The Touch Sand-Art Festival-2013 in Ukraine (Grand-Prix for best Live Performance and 1st prize for graphic drawing on Sand) and Sand-Malerei Festival – 2015, Daria Kotyukh, 29 years old, is today acknowledged as one of Europe’s greatest Sand-Artists.

 

 Painting & Sculpture

Katerina Barsukova

« Katerina’s works stand out not only for their remarkable technique of ingenious drawings in Lyrical Symbolism style, but also for their amazing transformations and great musicality.
A graduate of the Roehrich School of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, where she has a degree in Painting as well as the Saint-Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, where she majored in the History of Art, Katerina is a laureate of the international sand-art competition “The Touch-2015” in the “Graphic Art on Sand” Category and “The Touch-2016” in the “Best Video-Clip” Category for the work Sail on Ravel’s music. »

Painting & Sculpture

Yury Annenkov

Yury Pavlovich Annenkov ( 23 July  1889 in Petropavlovsk, Akmolinsk Oblast, Russian Empire – 12 July 1974 in Paris, France),was a Russian artist mostly known for his book illustrations and portraits. He also worked for theatre and cinema (design). A member of Mir Iskusstva.
In his essay "On Synthetism" (1922), Yevgeny Zamyatin writes that " has a keen awareness of the extraordinary rush and dynamism of our epoch. His sense of time is developed to the hundredth of a second. He has the knack--characteristic of Synthetism--of giving only the synthetic essence of things."
Yury Annenkov was born into a well-known family (among his ancestors was Pavel Annenkov, Alexander Pushkin's publisher); his father, Pavel Annenkov was involved with revolutionary activities that led him to exile in Siberia. The Annenkovs moved back to St. Petersburg in 1892.

 In 1908, Annenkov entered the University of St. Petersburg and attended Savely Seidenberg's studio classes, together with Marc Chagall. Next year, 1909, he attended Jan Ciągliński's studio. In 1911-1912, Annenkov moved to Paris to work in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton. In 1913, Annenkov worked in Switzerland. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1914, Annenkov mostly contributed to magazines (Satirikon, Teatr i Iskusstvo, Otechestvo) and worked for theatres.
Maxim Gorky's fairy-tale book, Samovar, published in 1917 was his first work as a book designer. His recognition as a book illustrator came in the wake of his most known work — designing Alexander Blok's poem, The Twelve, published in 1918 and gone through three printings within a year. In the next few years Annenkov designed numerous books for Petrograd authors (Mikhail Kuzmin and Aleksey Remizov, to name a few). In 1919 Annenkov designed and staged "First Distiller, or How an Imp Earned a Hunk of Bread", a comedy by Count Lev Tolstoi.

 Commissioned by the Bolshevik government, Annenkov together with Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, S. Maslovski and A. Kugel, designed and staged the open-air mystery "Liberated Labour Anthem" on 1 May 1920 in Petrograd. Later that year, Annenkov staged and designed another mass show, The Storming of the Winter Palace, part of the October Revolution anniversary celebrations in Palace Square, Petrograd. In 1919-1920 Annenkov made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and collages, influenced by the Dada movement.
1922 saw his book "Portraits". It contained 80 pictures of the key-figures of Russian art of the time (Gorki, Zamyatin, Remizov, Sologub, Blok, Akhmatova a.o.) made in 1906-1921. The book also included essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Kuzmin. He joined the Mir Iskusstva.
Annenkov left Russia in July 1924, first living in Germany and later settling in Paris. He continued to work as an artist and served as a costume designer for motion pictures. He was co-nominated with Rosine Delamare for the Academy Award for Costume Design for their work in the film The Earrings of Madame de... (1953). Wikipedia