Lot 101: f,m - EVGENY CHUBAROV, B.1934

UNTITLED

200 by 300cm., 78¾ by 118in.

signed four times and also with artist's cypher in Cyrillic on reverse and dated 1992

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

The Collection of the Artist

EXHIBITED

New York, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Group Show with Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt, 1999
St. Petersburg, The State Russian Museum, Evgeny Chubarov, 19 March - 20 May 2004, Ex.Cat. No.60 (illustrated)

NOTE

The offered work was executed in 1992-1995

The artist lives all his life in a certain degree of madness. You must use your mind to reveal the true image of reality. And then I say, 'You should explore your own Self, reveal in yourself both pure nature and the potential future'.

Chubarov's passion for self-expression is embodied in his abstract art, the basic elements of which he learnt from his Western counterparts. His later paintings such as the offered lot are reminiscent of works created by Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. As with Pollock, Chubarov's works are emphatically flat, large-scale and thickly covered with paint. Untitled exudes an energy and intensity characteristic of Abstract Expressionism. Kabakov, who also belonged to Chubarov's generation of artists, described the creative process in the following words: 'I experienced...some sort of a powerful electric discharge emerging as it were from within me. It was impossible to anticipate those movements of the pen and those brush strokes, they appeared of their own accord, but the configuration or pattern that gradually shaped up contained the memory and the feeling of that energy emanating from within' (Evgeny Chubarov: Return to the Abstract, St.Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2004, p.21).