Oleg Kudryashov
| Oleg Kudryashov | |
|---|---|
| Native name | Кудряшов, Олег Алексеевич |
| Born |
January 24, 1932 Moscow, Russia |
| Nationality |  |
| Education | Grabar Art School for Children |
Oleg Kudryashov (born 1932) is one of the most important Russian painters and printmakers of the Post-War era. He is currently living and working in Moscow. He almost exclusively works on paper using drypoint and watercolor/gouache as his medium. He is best known for his three-dimensional works, called constructions or reliefs, made by cutting and folding printed works to create sculptural pieces. Most of his works are unique or in very small editions.
Born in Moscow, Kudryashov initially studied in an art studio for youths from 1942 to 1947 and at the Grabar Art School for Children from 1949 to 1951. After serving in the Russian military, he spent the next three years [1956 to 1958] at the Moscow Animation Film Studios. In 1961 Kudryashov joined the Moscow Organization of Artists Union. He was well known in avant-garde circles but rarely exhibited together with his fellow artists. In 1974 he emigrated to London, England. Before departing he burned his life’s work of some twenty years in an open airfield on the outskirts of the Russian capital. After spending almost 25 years in London, he returned to Moscow in 1997.
Kudryashov’s work is difficult to categorize since it is at once both representational and abstract. He does not want to be pigeonholed and believes that ideology is the enemy of art because it limits the human imagination. Although his work is influenced by Russian constructivism and Suprematism, Lubok prints, and Russian Orthodox icons, Kudryashov does not share their utopian ideals. Kudryashov creates sculpture, videos, performance pieces, book illustrations, and an occasional collage but, is primarily a printmaker. His favorite technique is drypoint and engraving and his preferred material is the industrial zinc plate. Kudryashov does no preparatory studies prior to drawing directly on the plate using a large burin or engraving needle. For his larger prints he lays the sheet of zinc directly on the floor and works from all sides. For colored prints, paint is applied to the paper before being run through the press with the inked zinc plate.
In 1978 Kudryashov systematically began to produce three dimensional reliefs from his drypoint prints. For these pieces, the image is run twice through the press and one of the images is cut into various geometrical shapes. Then, the cut-up geometrical shapes are slotted one into another and the resultant three-dimensional construct is attached to the initial print. These art works blur the boundary between printing, painting, and sculpture. While Kudryashov “draws on the zinc plate as if it where a piece of paper, he uses the printed paper as if it were metal, exploiting its stiffness to cut and bend it into rigid structures.”
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