Post-War and Contemporary Russian Art from a Private Collection
Post-War and Contemporary Russian Art from a Private Collection
Property from a Private European Collection
Street at Night
Auction Closed
December 1, 01:41 PM GMT
Estimate
150,000 - 200,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from a Private European Collection
Erik Bulatov
b.1933
Street at Night
signed and titled in Cyrillic and dated 1966 on the reverse
oil on canvas
Canvas: 90 by 109.5cm, 35½ by 43in.
Framed: 93.5 by 113cm, 36¾ by 44½in.
Street at Night belongs to a series of works by Bulatov from the 1960s, which marked his departure from a predominantly figurative, expressionistic style influenced by the work of one of his early mentors, Robert Falk. Falk was a key figure within the Russian avant-garde realm who taught at Vkhutemas-Vkhutein in Moscow during the 1920s-early 1930s and whose artistic method influenced an entire generation of Soviet artists.
In 1956 Bulatov first encountered Falk’s close colleague from Vkhutemas-Vkhutein, wood engraver and theoretician Vladimir Favorsky. Favorsky’s teaching of book design as ‘a spatial visualisation of a literary work’ and his broader series of lectures on the theory of composition were among the most innovative and influential events which took place at the renowned institution over the course of its existence. It was the conversations with Favorsky during the late 1950s-early 1960s which helped Bulatov develop his own ideas about pictorial space and composition.
Similar to his abstract canvases of this period, for instance, Horizontal 1 from the same year, in Street at Night Bulatov employs white dotted and continuous horizontal lines, positioning them against a black background. This allows the artist to explore the spatial potential of the pictorial plane, which becomes ‘…transformed into a black space, plunging the viewer’s gaze into its infinite depths’ (M.Arndt (ed.), Erik Bulatov. Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes. Volume I: Paintings 1952-2011, Cologne: Wienand, 2011, p.76).
Here, however, Bulatov supplements his abstract composition with figurative elements. The most notable of these is a large-scale Magrittesque character, reminiscent, in its anonymity, of advertisements Bulatov encountered on a daily basis and highlighted as a strong influence on his work. The dotted lines, extending beyond the physical boundaries of the canvas, are simultaneously allusive of road markings and film reels. The superimposition of these various components adds further complexity and multidimentionality to the pictorial space. Street at Night is representative of Bulatov's early experimental body of work which paved the way towards the theoretical principles and aesthetic concerns defining his mature artistic practice.