Vladimir Yankilevsky

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

This work was exhibited in Yankilevsky's one-man show at the Biophysics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1965), which was banned by the Soviet authorities after only one night.

David Riff, ed., Variations of the Other: A Digital-Analog Monograph on the Work of Vladimir Yankilevsky, Bochum: The Lotman-Institute for Russian and Soviet Culture/Ruhr-University Bochum and Museum Bochum, 2002
Wolfgang Schlott, Vladimir Jankilevskij (Yankilevsky): Radierungen (Anatomie der Gefuhle, Stadt-Masken, Mutanten (Sodom and Gomorra), Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1999
Vladimir Yankilevsky: Retrospective, Moscow: The State Tretyakov Gallery, 1995, December-January, 1996
Mgnovenie vechnosti (A Moment of Eternity), Moscow and St. Petersburg: Ekaterina Foundation and the State Russian Museum, 2007, illustrated

A major Soviet nonconformist artist, Vladimir Yankilevsky sees the world as divided into two fundamental principles: masculine and feminine. The masculine principle is dynamic, unstable, and generally represented in profile, while the feminine, depicted frontally, embodies stability and provides a setting for the active (male) forces. These principles complement each other and are present in every individual, male or female.

The depiction of the man or the male profile, as in Portrait of a Young Man (1963), is among the most frequent and important images in Yankilevsky's oeuvre. Self-portraits can be found in his early pieces and play an important role throughout his entire artistic development, continuing into his collages and paintings. The male head in profile, which first appeared in Yankilevsky's work in the early 1960s in a number of self-portraits, soon became an icon, inhabiting a specific space in opposition to the female torso. Yankilevsky considers Portrait of a Young Man one of the first in a large series of such works that he created over the course of forty years. In both the triptychs and his later works, Yankilevsky continues to reinterpret and explore the male profile, deforming and varying its characteristic features. Yankilevsky's male profiles always represent a fusion of the general and the autobiographical. Portrait of a Young Man is both a character study and an intellectual self-appraisal; the head is dynamic, restless, and searching, while its eyes, ear, jaw, and skull are presented as semi-abstract, nearly ornamental elements.

Yankilevsky received his initial artistic training at the Moscow Secondary Art School, where he studied from 1950 to 1956. However, he found academic training rather conservative and limiting. Yankilevsky was greatly influenced by an exhibition of Pablo Picasso's works he saw in Moscow in 1956. He started working as a book illustrator, and in 1957 he was admitted as a student to the art department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. While at the Institute Yankilevsky took classes with the experimental artist Eli Beliutin. Beliutin, the first artist to teach Abstract Expressionism in the Soviet Union, was eventually forced to resign from the Institute in 1958.

In 1965, Yankilevsky had a one-man show at the Biophysics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, but the exhibition was banned by the Soviet authorities after the first night. That same year, two other exhibitions featuring the artist's work, at the Dubna Science Center and the Protvino Science Center, were also banned.

In 1980 Yankilevsky finally became a member of the Artists' Union, after being initially rejected for membership in 1971. He moved to New York in 1990, and then to Paris in 1992. Yankilevsky has had more than thirty one-man shows, including retrospective exhibitions in Moscow in 1978 and 1987, exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Bochum in 1988 and the Paris Art Center in 1998, and a retrospective at The State Tretyakov Gallery in 1995. His works were also included in the Russia! exhibition presented by the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2005 and in Bilbao in 2006.