Chubarov, Evgeny Iosifovich

Evgeny Chubarov
Evgeny Chubarov
Birth name	Evgeny Chubarov
Date of Birth	December 11, 1934
Place of Birth	with. Lower Bobino , Bashkortostan , USSR
Date of death	December 2, 2012 (77 years)
Place of death	City Mytishchi, Moscow region., Russia
A country	; ;
Genre	painting , drawing , sculpture
Patrons	Gary Tatintsyan
Awards	Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellow

Evgeniy Iosifovich Chubarov ( December 11, 1934 , p. Nizhnee Bobino , Bashkortostan - December 5, 2012 , Mytishchi, Moscow Region) - Russian painter , artist , sculptor and graphic artist.

Content

Early years

Yevgeny Iosifovich Chubarov was born on December 11, 1934 in the village of Nizhnee Bobino , Mechetli district of Bashkortostan in a Russian-Armenian family (father is Armenian, mother is Russian). A passion for drawing arose from the artist in his childhood, under the influence of his father. In his youth, wanting to get a more prestigious profession, Chubarov went to Zlatoust to his uncle, who helped him get a job at the Zlatoust Applied School of Metal Engraving. The artist studied at the jeweler, designer decorative weapons. After graduating from college, Chubarov served five years in the army in the Baltic Fleet .

1950s - 60s

In 1959, the artist went to Saratov , then to Zagorsk (now Sergiev Posad ), where he worked in the restoration studio of the sculptor Dmitry Tsaplin. Soon, Chubarov met his future wife, Lyudmila Gukovich, who worked at the time in Istria as a children's general practitioner and in 1961 entered into marriage with her.

In 1963, the paintings of Chubarov "March" and "Factory Landscape" fall on the exhibition of young artists in Moscow. "Factory Landscape" is then published in the magazine "Art" , just a few months after the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev visited the exhibition "XXX years MOSH" in the Manezh and criticized artists focused on the European avant-garde . At the same time, Chubarov is fond of wooden sculpture, receiving material from a friend of the engineer Zagorsky brick factory. According to the memoirs of the artist's wife, these were growth portraits, reminiscent of photographs of victims of Auschwitz.

The graphic and pictorial works of the 60s clearly interpret the artist’s interest in eros, both physical and psychological. The 1969 canvas depicts a woman sitting on a man’s lap, who has a dark green square instead of a head with casually scattered eyes and mouth. The treatment of male figures as geometric shadows is also found in other works of this period. The masculine is understood by Chubarov as impersonal, incomplete, this is the basic stage of the design of subconscious impulses.

1970s - 80s

In 1970 — the 1980s, Chubarov switched from simple compositions to a new interpretation of the relationship between pictorial and corporal mass and worked a lot on his series of powerful multi-figure ink compositions on paper. Compositionally, his works inherit Bosch’s “Carrying the Cross” (1515–1516), Boris Grigoriev’s expressionism of the period “Faces of Russia” (1920–30s) and Paul Filonov’s analytical experiments. If earlier Chubarov wrote separate figures in easily readable relationships, now he creates situations of maximum closeness, filling the canvas with new and new faces and bodies, rarely linked by a common plot.

In Draka (1982), Chubarov equates the surface of the canvas with the body, the skin, erasing the boundary between the picturesque and bodily masses. Later, such an understanding of the painting surface will help him move on to the final irrelevance. The motives of "Fighting" will remain with the artist and during the period of the occupation of a pure abstraction, but will move into numerous drawings.

Other canvases of the 1980s are also full of references to hidden and demonstrative sexuality — from the image of a grave-digger to characters with chopped limbs or traces of rigor mortis on their faces.

For several decades Chubarov worked on a series of stone sculptures. A composition of 283 stone heads placed in a separate wall and collected by a grid is located in the Moscow Museon Sculpture Park ; This structure, as well as the meaning of the work - a monument to the victims of Stalin's repressions - was invented not by the artist, but by the management of the park, who accepted these sculptures as a gift in the mid-1990s.

In 1986, Chubarov was accepted into the Union of Artists of the USSR .

Years abroad

The Soviet part of Chubarov’s biography is not rich in external events and does not indicate that the artist was trying to gain a foothold in the underground : his name does not appear in the lists of artists who tried to exhibit independently.

At the invitation of art dealer Gary Tatintsyan, the artist leaves first to Berlin, where he lives and works for 8 years, and then to New York. At this time, the last transformation of his manner occurs. From expressionism, Chubarov goes into pure abstraction and succeeds - he becomes a fellow of the Jackson Pollock-Krasner Foundation (inaccessible link) , participates in exhibitions along with the greatest artists of the postwar generation . Chubarov comes to abstraction at the moment when it ceases to be a political gesture of emancipation from the official requirements for art. Such a late step beyond the limits of narrative art underlines his inner independence from the artistic context in which he worked. Chubarov was able to focus on the painstaking production of a non-figurative picture, primarily as a thing, an object in different dimensions, from ornamental to psychological. Chubarov himself considered himself the heir of the Russian “archaic” culture, drawing a parallel of his technique with the ideas of Malevich’s “black square”, uniquely interpreted the Russian parsun style, visually capturing the energy of the world around him.

1990s

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the main task of Chubarov in painting has become the transition to abstract writing in several layers, devoid of "dark passions", quite the contrary - optimistic compared to works of the Soviet era. The experience of depicting anarchic corporality in the 1970s – 1980s allowed Chubarov to abandon self-manifesting symbols. The artist abandoned the close contact with the canvas characteristic of abstract expressionism, which turns the picture into a gesture fixation, like in Pollock , or in the speculative space of pure color, like in Rothko . Chubarov wrote works both for a close look, and for viewing from afar.

In the late 90s, Chubarov and his wife returned to Moscow, settling in an apartment in Mytishchi , where many representatives of unofficial and official culture often stayed (including Ernst Neizvestny , Ilya Kabakov and others).

Personal and group exhibitions

The monumental works of Chubarov were shown at well-known sites in Europe and the USA, and later in Russia. At the group exhibitions, works by Chubarov were exhibited along with the paintings of the classics of the 20th century - Mel Bochner, Frank Stella, Saul Levitt, Damien Hirst, Peter Helly and Stefan Balkenhol.

In 2015, the personal exhibition of Yevgeny Chubarov dedicated to the 80th birthday of the artist was held at the Gary Tatintsian Gallery ^[1] .

In August 2016, the personal exhibition of the artist "The Berlin Works" opened in the German city of Hagen at the Carl Ernst Osthaus Museum .

Awards and Achievements

Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellow.

On June 22, 2007, at the Russian auction of the Phillip's auction house, E. Chubarov 's painting “Untitled” of 1994 was sold for a record amount for a living artist from Russia - $ 1,198,500.

Quotes

Fall into your own "I", and then you will understand what a personal road of life and the burden of time, the severity of our dubious era will leave you, free your body and soul, become artists in the simplest and most natural sense.

E. Chubarov

Art, lying on the surface, can be mistaken.

E. Chubarov

In his work, Chubarov predicted the rebirth of the habitual abstraction of gesture into a new intellectual form, with the alphabet found only in its own language, its own language and dramaturgy, where the image and the concept of its embodiment become one.

Gary Tatintsyan about Evgenia Chubarov

His abstract compositions are borderline states, binary, a return to the sources of form, conflict and harmony, male and female. This is the theme of death and birth, the interweaving of the image of human flesh with objects of uncharted internal space, opening the eyes to new laws.

Gary Tatintsyan about Evgenia Chubarov

In his utmost, in his last compositions, in the sensations of the impossibility of overcoming the limits of art, Yevgeny Chubarov turns the body into a sign, a hieroglyph ruined by deformations. Rewriting historical reality, consistently denying Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Austrian actionism and German “new wilds”, the artist opens a special page in the history of culture, where the sign acquires sensual flesh, and the emotion is preserved in digital instrumentality.

Vitaliy Patsyukov about Evgenia Chubarov)

The 20th century began with Cezanne, with his phrase that everything can be reduced to a ball, a cylinder and a cone, as if to the genetic code of space ... My ribbon-like signs, sometimes resembling flags, sometimes crescent-shaped curves that Malevich spoke about - and there is a ball , cylinder and cone, but on a more difficult level. They arise as portions of energy, as its forms ... On them, I think, all the newest art is built.

E. Chubarov (from interview with Vitaly Patsyukov)

Before you - an abstraction in its pure form, where the image and the concept of abstraction become one.