Timur Novikov, 1958-2002

The offered lot depicts the St Petersburg skyline during White Nights.  Two bridges are drawn up over the river Neva to give temporary passage to large ships and tankers sailing to and from the Baltic Sea.  Novikov dominated the cultural and artistic life of the city before and after glasnost and perestroika, spearheading an important avant-garde, underground movement called The New Artists in 1982.  During the mid 80s he travelled in Western Europe and the USA, where he met and was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. At this time, St Petersburg witnessed the revival of Neo-Classicism in art, a return to traditional values of the Academy and a preference for harmony and aestheticism, which was in part a rejection of Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism.

Behind the simple, visual appeal of Novikov's textile collages lies a network of cultural and autobiographical references.  In his writings Novikov recalls a particularly informative experience in his childhood, during a trip to Novaya Zemlya, a sparsely populated arctic land off the coast of North Western Russia.  In this frozen landscape dominated by empty space, he observed how the local northern tribes learnt to recognise a kill by its contours and to calculate the distance to the prey by the horizon line.

Later, he took an academic interest in the role of art in Nomadic Russian tribes for whom decorative textiles, fabrics, carpets and appliqués were important vehicles of creative expression as well as tools for the dissemination of information.  This was a portable, accessible domestic art form that could be easily folded, taken to a new camp, and displayed once more.  Drawing parallels between nomadic life and his own practice, Novikov accessed his own feelings of displacement as an artist living in a period of immense political and social change.

Other stylistic influences on his textiles include the work of the leading Russian modernist artist Mikhail Larionov, for his primitivism and the use of the written word in his paintings.  Stencilling is a dominant element, with each work bearing Novikov's name, the title and date.  This pays homage to the great Russian futurist poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who in the early 1920s had designed Agitprop posters combining graphics and stencilled political slogans.

Although a theoretician, Novikov eschewed dogma and developed a kind of visual language using colour, line and perspective which aimed to reconcile the personal and universal.  His textiles are usually split into two sections, representing the duality found in nature and human thought and acknowledging the 2-dimensionality of the medium.  His preferred subjects chart contemporary events, depict modes of transport, nomadic settlements, nature, dream-like worlds or cities the artist visited and in which he lived, such as his native St Petersburg.
The offered lot depicts the St Petersburg skyline during White Nights.  Two bridges are drawn up over the river Neva to give temporary passage to large ships and tankers sailing to and from the Baltic Sea.  Novikov dominated the cultural and artistic life of the city before and after glasnost and perestroika, spearheading an important avant-garde, underground movement called The New Artists in 1982.  During the mid 80s he travelled in Western Europe and the USA, where he met and was influenced by Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. At this time, St Petersburg witnessed the revival of Neo-Classicism in art, a return to traditional values of the Academy and a preference for harmony and aestheticism, which was in part a rejection of Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism.

Behind the simple, visual appeal of Novikov's textile collages lies a network of cultural and autobiographical references.  In his writings Novikov recalls a particularly informative experience in his childhood, during a trip to Novaya Zemlya, a sparsely populated arctic land off the coast of North Western Russia.  In this frozen landscape dominated by empty space, he observed how the local northern tribes learnt to recognise a kill by its contours and to calculate the distance to the prey by the horizon line.

Later, he took an academic interest in the role of art in Nomadic Russian tribes for whom decorative textiles, fabrics, carpets and appliqués were important vehicles of creative expression as well as tools for the dissemination of information.  This was a portable, accessible domestic art form that could be easily folded, taken to a new camp, and displayed once more.  Drawing parallels between nomadic life and his own practice, Novikov accessed his own feelings of displacement as an artist living in a period of immense political and social change.

Other stylistic influences on his textiles include the work of the leading Russian modernist artist Mikhail Larionov, for his primitivism and the use of the written word in his paintings.  Stencilling is a dominant element, with each work bearing Novikov's name, the title and date.  This pays homage to the great Russian futurist poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who in the early 1920s had designed Agitprop posters combining graphics and stencilled political slogans.

Although a theoretician, Novikov eschewed dogma and developed a kind of visual language using colour, line and perspective which aimed to reconcile the personal and universal.  His textiles are usually split into two sections, representing the duality found in nature and human thought and acknowledging the 2-dimensionality of the medium.  His preferred subjects chart contemporary events, depict modes of transport, nomadic settlements, nature, dream-like worlds or cities the artist visited and in which he lived, such as his native St Petersburg.