Evgeny Rukhin

Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton, eds., New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and the Unknown, Washington, D.C., and Mechanicsville, Md.: The Cremona Foundation and Acropolis Books Ltd., 1977, pp. 111-13
Regina Khidekel, "Traditionalist Rebels: Nonconformist Art in Leningrad," in Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998, pp. 129-47
Ruth Mayfield, Eugene Rukhin: A Contemporary Russian Artist, Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, August-September, 1975
Alla Rosenfeld, "'A Great City with a Provincial Fate': Nonconformist Art in Leningrad from the Khrushchev Thaw to Gorbachev's Perestroika," in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton  T. Dodge, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, New York and London: Thames and Hudson and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1995, pp. 101-134
Marina Unksova, ed., "Minuvshikh dnei opal'naia chreda...": Khudozhnik Evgeny Rukhin i ego vremia, St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo imeni N. I. Novikova, 2005

Leningrad artist Evgenii Rukhin was one of the original forces behind the unofficial art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although he died at the age of thirty-two in a mysterious fire in his studio, Rukhin was an extremely prolific artist, working on at least five or six pieces at a time and producing over one thousand works during his brief career. Most works by Rukhin are now found outside of Russia. Only a few works remain there, some of which were given away as gifts by the artist, others purchased by rare collectors of nonconformist art. Foreigners were practically the only clients in Rukhin's studio during the 1960s-1970s.

In 1963, when an exhibition of American graphic arts traveled to the Soviet Union, Rukhin went to the show in both its Moscow and Leningrad venues. The exhibition had a major impact on Rukhin's artistic development. For the first time, he saw the works of such American artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Jim Dine. Influenced by the work of his American contemporaries, Rukhin started creating paintings consisting of monochromatic fields, richly textured assemblages, and stenciled phrases.

A self-taught artist who had studied geology, Rukhin experimented for a time with various surfaces and textures as he searched for new techniques. In 1968, he shifted from working in a purely abstract style to employing a method that incorporated objects from everyday life--doors, broken pieces of furniture, and other items that, as Rukhin described, "civilization has discarded as useless." He transformed these familiar objects into elements of an abstract design, often juxtaposing them with ironic warnings, as, for example, that seen on the packing cases of stencils: "Dangerous to life." Rukhin used nearly square canvases for his compositions, explaining that "this shape is most independent of the proportions of a portrait (vertical) or of a landscape (horizontal)."

In 1966, the first international exhibition of Rukhin's work took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Fearless in his activities as a nonconformist artist, Rukhin also participated in many unofficial apartment exhibitions. He was arrested as one of the organizers of the notorious "Bulldozer Exhibition" (First Fall Open-Air Exhibition of Paintings) held on the outskirts of Moscow in 1974.

Religious motifs always played an important role in Rukhin's art. During his travels in the northern regions of Russia, Rukhin gathered an impressive collection of photographs depicting old Russian churches in ruins. The recurring theme of the "dissolving" or disappearing Virgin became central in the artist's work.

To create relief images of icons on canvas, Rukhin used "formoplast"--a yellow jelly-like substance. Formoplast was applied to the metal surface of an icon, and removed after solidifying. The end result was a form that was flexible enough to stretch or alter in any other way in order to achieve greater expressivity. Next, a thick layer of tempera was applied to a canvas, on which the final form of an icon would be imprinted. Rukhin most commonly made seals or imprints from old Russian icons, such as the Virgin or St. Nicholas, as exemplified by this work.