Lot 302
  • 302

Tair Salakhov

Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
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Description

  • Tair Salakhov
  • Granada
  • signed in Cyrillic l.r.; further signed and titled on the reverse, bearing a USSR export label on the stretcher and Gekkoso label on the backing board
  • oil on canvas
  • 70 by 90cm, 27 1/2 by 35 1/2 in.

Provenance

Gekkoso Gallery, Tokyo

Exhibited

Tokyo, Gekkoso Gallery, Tair Salakhov, 1979

Literature

Exhibition catalogue Tair Salakhov, Tokyo: Gekkoso Gallery, 1979, p.33, no.28 illustrated

Catalogue Note

Yoko Nakamura, the director of Gekkoso Gallery, first visited the Soviet Union in 1969 convinced that the country’s art must be worth exploring. ‘The music, literature and theatre of the Soviet Union are all excellent. There cannot be poor painting in a country where the arts are so highly developed.’ A year later the gallery held the first selling exhibition of Soviet art in Japan, these continued annually for over ten years and visited Tokyo, Osaka and Sapporo. Nakamura was involved in numerous enterprises to promote the Soviet Union in Japan. She published a quarterly art magazine in Japan in association with the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Artists of the USSR, and organised a huge retrospective of Soviet and Russian Painting which included over 600 works from the State Tretyakov Gallery, including Ivan Shishkin's Rye Fields and Tair Salakhov's Portrait of Aidan.

The present work was most likely created at the same time as a closely comparable 1978 view of the rooftops of Granada from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg. This is the same year as Salakhov’s first one-man show in Moscow, which was extremely well received by both the public and critics alike. This success was followed by an international tour of one-man shows in Tokyo, Madrid and Barcelona in 1979 and Prague in 1980. Similarly to Aidan, offered in these rooms on 1 December 2015, the present work was most likely painted for the artist’s show in Tokyo in 1979.