Two decades promoting Human Rights through the art.
The Pushkin Gallery has built its mission on promoting human rights through the arts for the last two decades. With a focus on developing entire life collections, Kenneth Pushkin has collected, curated and published the works of outstanding Russian artists who chose to work outside the tenets set forth by the Soviet regime, often at a great cost. Painters such as Chetkov, Golubev and Timkov had voices that could not be repressed. The work is deep, strong and important across all borders. In spite of the many hardships and persecution that they faced, each of these artists never betrayed their true inner spirit, choosing to convey the beautiful and the elegant.
Boris Chetkov (1926-2010)
Boris Alexandrovich Chetkov was a bold experimenter who took artistic risks which resulted in the creation of original and stunning images, developing his own unique unofficial artistic style. Through the course of his life, and the depth and breadth of his expression, he ultimately created his own school of ‘Experimentalism’. Rather than overtly political or conceptual his Experimentalist style mixes elements of folk art and primitivism, spirituality and the Russian avant-garde.
Chetkov’s oeuvre is visually and thematically reminiscent of the early works of Kandinsky, Goncharova and Lentulov. While he never consciously followed the influence of these earlier masters, we can easily see comparisons with their work. In carving his own path, Chetkov established himself as an important contributor and spiritual heir to this Russian artistic legacy.
Nikolai timkov (1912-1993)
Nikolai Efimovich Timkov was one of the most enchanting and important Russian landscape painters of the second half of the 20th century. He pursued his work, managing to protect it from outside influences and demands extraneous to art and that in stern times, when the state monitored every breath and every stroke of the brush. Today, when many a reputation has crumbled and once-celebrated names have been consigned to oblivion, Timkov’s work is attracting ever-increasing public interest.
The rise of Russian Impressionism liberated the landscape from the somber palette of the past while moving inexorably toward the abstraction of the future. It was here that a generation of painters, led by Nikolai Timkov, found the lyrical language to convey the beauty and vastness of the Russian countryside.
