Oleg Vassiliev

Acquired directly from the artist

Original canvas which is a little slack on the strecher. There is a layer of light surface dirt. There are areas of fine craquelure to the sections painted black. There are a couple of very minor chips to the paint surface as a result. Some pigments fluoresce under UV light and some spots of uneven varnish can be seen. However, no retouching is visible. Held in a simple wooden slip frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Oleg Vassiliev was born in 1931 in Moscow. He started to draw in early childhood under his father's instruction, studied at Moscow Secondary Art School and graduated from the Moscow V.I Surikov State Art Institute in 1958 where he met his long term friend and collaborator Erik Bulatov. Together they worked as children's book illustrators and shared a studio for many years. Officially conforming to Soviet standards in his work, Vassiliev was able to take part in the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement, also known as unofficial or dissident art.  Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 publicly denouncing Stalin, opened the country to exhibitions of modern Western artists including Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock and for a while, the abstract and non-figurative art of the early Nonconformists was tolerated by the authorities. However, that brief moment of tentative artistic liberalisation came to an abrupt end with an exhibition at the Manezh to which Khrushchev reacted furiously and led an attack against Formalism and Nihilism. Shortly afterwards, Khrushchev was overthrown and, with his successor Brezhnev, every hope of change was lost. Despite the danger of repression and the curtailment of the freedom of expression, manifested most prominently in the deportation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the incarceration of Andrei Sakharov, Vassiliev continued to create his metaphysical paintings. Vassiliev emigrated to the United States in 1989 where he currently lives and works.

Vassiliev's artistic development has largely been shaped by his search for new means of expression. He intends to overcome the stylistic framework of traditional and modernist art and leaves behind the entire spectrum of cultural experience. Inspired by avant-garde artist such as Favorsky, Falk and Fonvinsin, which were denounced for Formalism under Stalin, he emphasises the constructive quality of the image-making.

The most important aspect of Vassiliev's paintings is the concept of light as the illumination of all the components of existence. Unlike an impressionist painting, light  in Vassiliev's work embodies the unchangeable. Ilya Kabakov, Vassiliev's fellow student at the Surikov Institute and a close friend, writes in 1980 that "through the workings of memory, light comes from the past and illuminates, snatches out of the dark that which is not out of this moment, that which will live outside time and space, that which is always close if one only holds out ones hand." Vassiliev experiences the future "as a black hole, as an emptiness devoid of matter; a hole that [...] fills up with life to the extent that it turns into the past." Light becomes a metaphysical principle that is reflected on the canvas and mediates between time, artist and viewer. It is the essence of remembrance and grows stronger the deeper one delves into the past. This dualism of colours correlates with the canvas' space and makes room for Vassiliev's personal memories in present reality.

As seen in Walking Away and Before the Sunset, Vassiliev masterfully incorporates elements from different times and spaces, which he arranges in harmony with the paintings' logic space.

Walking Away. 1978

Encountering Oleg Vassiliev's Walking Away is like experiencing the artist's innermost creative self, here, manifested in a quiet artistic reaction to established systems of art. Vassiliev means to escape the trivial meaninglessness of the official ideological space by concentrating on the spiritual dimension of light, space and time. Although he considers himself to be indifferent to social and political issues, an artistic position of non-involvement would automatically have a certain political meaning. As Vassiliev puts it: "He who is not with us, is against us."

Walking Away is an exceptional painting recording the full spectrum of Vassiliev's creative style. It combines constructivist form with traditional Russian realism and brings them together in a context of time. The recurring preoccupation with light and shade points to the work's psychological dimension, with light symbolizing the memories from the past, and darkness the unknown future. Walking away feels like Vassiliev's own spiritual awakening and expresses his hope that the dark future will bring a yet unknown freedom of expression. Hence the movement of the figure into the pictorial space, which shows Vassiliev's use of painting as an "instrument of internal immigration in a world where actual immigration remained unthinkable."