Evgeny Rukhin

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Ruth Mayfield, Eugene Rukhin: A Contemporary Russian Artist, Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1975, exhibition catalogue
Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton, eds., New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and the Unknown, Washington, D.C., and Mechanicsville, Md.: The Cremona Foundation and Acropolis Books Ltd., 1977, exhibition catalogue, pp. 111-113
Alla Rosenfeld, " 'A Great City with a Provincial Fate': Nonconformist Art in Leningrad from the Khrushchev Thaw to Gorbachev's Perestroika," in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton  T. Dodge, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, New York and London: Thames and Hudson and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1995, pp. 101-134
Regina Khidekel, "Traditionalist Rebels: Nonconformist Art in Leningrad," in Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998, pp. 129-147
Marina Unksova, ed., "Minuvshikh dnei opal'naia chreda...": Khudozhnik Evgenii Rukhin i ego vremia, St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo imeni N. I. Novikova, 2005

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is stretched on its original stretcher and on the right side of the reverse of the canvas, three or four reinforcements have been added to support some of the applied elements of the painting. The thick and complex paint layer and collaged areas appear to be in very healthy state. There is a small dent in the upper center situated approximately five inches from the top edge and the paint layer is slightly dirty. Other than this the condition seems to be very good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The Leningrad artist Evgeny Rukhin was one of the original forces behind the unofficial art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although he died at the age of thirty-two in a mysterious fire in his studio, Rukhin was an extremely prolific artist, working on at least five or six pieces at a time and producing over one thousand works during his brief career. Most of his works are now found outside of Russia. Only a few works remain there, some of which were given away as gifts by the artist; others were purchased by rare collectors of nonconformist art. Foreigners were practically the only clients in Rukhin's studio during the 1960s-1970s.

In 1963, when an exhibition of American graphic arts traveled to the Soviet Union, Rukhin went to the show in both its Moscow and Leningrad venues. The exhibition had a major impact on his artistic development. For the first time, he saw the works of such American artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Jim Dine. Influenced by the work of his American contemporaries, Rukhin began to create paintings consisting of monochromatic fields, stenciled phrases, and richly textured assemblages.

A self-taught artist who had studied geology, Rukhin experimented for a time with various surfaces and textures as he searched for new techniques. In 1968, he shifted from working in a purely abstract style to employing a method that incorporated objects from everyday life—doors, broken pieces of furniture, and other items that, as Rukhin described, "civilization has discarded as useless." He transformed these familiar objects into elements of abstract design, often juxtaposing them with inscriptions. For his compositions Rukhin used canvases that were nearly square, explaining that "this shape is most independent of the proportions of a portrait (vertical) or of a landscape (horizontal)."

In 1966, the first international exhibition of Rukhin's work took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Fearless in his activities as a nonconformist artist, Rukhin also participated in many unofficial apartment exhibitions. He was arrested as one of the organizers of the notorious "Bulldozer Exhibition" (First Fall Open-Air Exhibition of Paintings) held on the outskirts of Moscow in 1974.