Ernst Neizvestny

Although best known as a sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny is also a painter and graphic artist. He is also known for his strong response to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's condemnation of modern art at the infamous Manezh exhibition in Moscow in 1962. Ironically, Khrushchev's family subsequently asked the artist to design the Premier's tomb in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Neizvestny's sculpture exudes a robustness and power whether small or gigantic in size. Having trained under Vladimir Tatlin, the famous Constructivist artist of the 1920s, Neizvestny combines figurative and Constructivist elements in his sculpture to convey the tension between the spiritual, psychological, and physical aspects of humanity. As one writer described his work, "For Neizvestny, the human body is the field of all possible metaphors. All that he has to say can be said in terms of the human body."

In fact, the artist finds in each work a dialogue between what he terms a work's "inner spirit" and its exterior form. Like other Russian artists who seek to reconcile the particular and the universal, Neizvestny has extended his notion of a dualistic dialogue to include that between humans and nature, life and death, dislocation and union, and harmony and disharmony.