Vladimir Yankilevsky

The present work belongs to a series Yankilevsky executed in the early 1990s while living in New York. The title alludes to the famous jazz standard ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’ immortalised by Duke Ellington and dedicated to the ‘A’ line of the New York subway system operating between East Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Similar to Yankilevsky’s large-scale works from the Soviet period, most of the works from the ‘Take the Train’ series are either triptychs or polyptychs. Writing about the series, art historian Alexander Borovsky highlighted its distinct jazz-inspired rhythm, referring both to the city where the series was produced as well as to Yankilevsky’s long-standing fascination with jazz music. In the non-representational elements within these works Borovsky saw ‘…projections of [a] subway station with shining light and adverts on the retina, when the train goes away into the darkness of the tunnel’ (Vladimir Yankilevsky, Moment of Eternity, St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007, p.26). The nude figures, longing towards each other but unable to ‘merge and constitute a singal whole’ reflect, in Borovsky’s view, the individualism and loneliness defining life in big cities (ibid.).

The series, including the present lot, was shown at Yankilevsky’s solo exhibition at the Le Monde de l’Art gallery in Paris in 1992, marking the artist’s move from New York to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life.