I can refer to almost all off the works which I produced until recently to those produced very early on in my life. Take Windows, for example: I believe that the first work of that series I made was in 1967, the one that is in the Bar-Gera collection. Stylistically it is quite different, but it is a window. As a matter of fact, I have some other works, much earlier works, where the window is not designed as a window but as part of some picture – small pictures, different ones, which seem to have nothing to do with it, there were some breakthroughs in that direction. And it is the same for all my other works. These are psychoanalytical objects which seem to be rooted in my subconsciousness. My works never have any content, any message. I keep talking about it and insisting upon it, but, obviously, there is some glitch making me return to them again and again. And if you look really hard, you can find it in any artist, not just myself.
Dating from 1975, the present work is – with the exception of the aforementioned Window No. 1 sold at Sotheby’s London as part of the Bar-Gera Collection in November 2016 – the earliest work in what is arguably the most important and well-known series in Chuikov’s oeuvre, to which he returned over the course of several decades.
In his Windows, the artist painted an image (or fragments of images) on a board, to which he had attached the wooden structure of a window frame, sometimes with metal hardware. The window frame creates a sensation of space and invites the viewer in, whereas the painting is just that – a painting. The images Chuikov used could be an approximate imitation of a landscape outside a window, or a copy of someone else’s painting, such as Malevich’s Black Square. In the present work, Chuikov copied a night view of Constantinople by Ivan Aivazovsky (1847, Aivazovsky Picture Gallery, Feodosia), one of Russia’s most celebrated painters.
Chuikov was a leading figure of Soviet non-conformism. A conceptualist, he was together with Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov a member of Sretensky Boulevard Group. The artist spent the latter part of his life in Cologne, where he died in 2020. The present work was acquired in Russia in the late 1980s, most likely from the artist, and has been kept in the same German collection ever since.