Sergei Shablavin

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Berthy Quaedvlieg, Rolf Wedewer, and Peter van Rooy, Sergey Shablavin: Between Emptiness and Hope, Netherlands, Quaedvlieg Modern Fine Art, 2004, p. 85, illustrated
Vitaly Patsyukov, "Sergey Shablavin," A-Ya (Unofficial Russian Art Review), 1979, pp. 21-24

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. The paint layer is not dirty, nor has it recently been cleaned. The thickly painted gesso beneath the paint layer has cracked diagonally running through the image in the lower left and also in the lower right across the portrait of the boy and the snow scene. These cracks could be eliminated if the painting were to be lined, but they are not unstable. There appear to be no restorations which have been applied to this painting.
"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 conceptual works of Sergey Shablavin have an affinity with the artistic language of the historical Russian avant-garde. He was inspired by the work of Russian avant-garde figures—Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and El Lissitzky—as well as Western artists, in particular Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt. Ideas of light, movement, and space are essential elements in Shablavin's oeuvre.

Because Soviet art institutions were very conservative, allowing their students to practice only academic realism, Shablavin decided to study science instead of art. In 1961 he entered the Moscow Physical Engineering Institute; after his graduation in 1967 he went on to work as a scientist in the institute's department of cybernetics. When he was already a mature artist, he continued his studies at the People's University of the Arts (1980-84). He became part of the underground artistic circle in Moscow, forming especially close relationships with such major nonconformist artists as Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Ilya Kabakov and participating in various unofficial exhibitions in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

In the late 1970s, Shablavin began a series of works wherein he would depict fragments of reality that he would place within a geometric, grid-like structure. The art critic Vitaly Patsyukov observed that Shablavin had "found a way to combine into one single object the small and the infinitely large, compressing the limitless into a restricted space."

In Winter Shablavin projected a geometrical structure onto the bleak winter landscape and two generic portraits of a young woman and the type of energetic worker often found in Soviet-era posters. The geometrical grid, which breaks up the landscape scene into fragments and in the process creates the impression of six discrete pictures, alludes to the impossibility of maintaining a coherent, unified vision of the world. According to the artist, the idea behind this and other such works emerged as a result of Shablavin's visit to the apartment of some friends, during which he saw their young son playing with bricks and trying to put together a puzzle.