Tselkov Оleg

Small in the mouth of the big 161,5x130 cm, canvas, oil
About work

Tselkov from an early age was fascinated by creative pursuits in the spirit of “Jack of Diamonds”, but the real recognition and success brought him the so-called artist himself “face”. They are bald heads or a smooth face-mask. This image was created by the artist in 1960. In those years, the artist showed his paintings at apartment and semi-official exhibitions. It was then that his individual manner, close to surrealism, was finally formed.

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Date of Birth: 1934

Oleg Tselkov was a Russian and Soviet artist. Since 1977 he has lived and worked in Paris. Winner of the non-state Russian award “Triumph”. He was born in Moscow into a family of employees.

He studied at the Moscow Secondary Art School, then at the Minsk Theater Institute, where he was expelled for “formalism”. In 1955 he entered the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. I. Repin, was forced to interrupt his classes for the same reason. In 1958 he graduated from the Leningrad Theater Institute with a degree in stage technology, where he was a student of the legendary theater artist Nikolai Akimov.

Like many other representatives of Russian unofficial art, the artist was forced to leave the country. In 1977 he emigrated and settled in Paris. Thanks to Dovlatov’s famous story “Solo on Underwood”, the artist himself became a semi-mythical figure of Russian underground art.

O. Tselkov, who became a popular symbol of the Soviet artistic underground in the West in the early 1970s, calls his heroes an “unprecedented tribe.” The Nahamkin Gallery (New York) provided him with special assistance in promoting Tselkov’s works to the world art market. Since then, his paintings have found their way into private, public and museum collections around the world, from Japan to the United States, his solo exhibitions at the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, and the value of the artist’s work has increased “as the area of ​​paintings increases.”

The artist says that he “painted a general portrait, all together in one person and terribly familiar.” He does not set himself the task of exposing the “bad” or revealing the “good,” as he himself admits, “I am looking for something more real, subcutaneous, that brings us all together. I cannot have specific claims against anyone, but I have more than a specific claim to the masses.” people who humiliate, torture and send each other to that world. ” For this reason, many of his works have a rather tough mood.

Sometimes face masks are combined with aggressive objects, such as a knife, nails, pins or in this case a fork. This is a clearly focused image, devoid of any individuality. The head, made with a special intensity of color, follows from the dark background, looking at his slit-glasses on the audience.

Playwright Arthur Miller once said: “Tselkov combined almost brutal and fierce colors with a completely natural form and way. His paintings are full of innovation, sometimes they are completely satirical and tragic.” The artist himself admits that “since I created this collective image, all my life I think about the mystery of the person and do not find the answer. Forty years from day to day I look at my own hand-drawn faces, asking everyone “Who are you?”. The meaning of their answer is devoid of clarity, spreading like smoke … It is clear to me only that they have a thousand years behind them and eternity ahead … “.

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Works IN COLLECTION

Works IN COLLECTION