Oleg Tselkov. Stranger Automatic translate

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, together with the Tsukanov Family Foundation, presents the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of one of the most famous classics of Soviet nonconformism, Oleg Tselkov.

Oleg Tselkov is a recognized pioneer of the difficult path of domestic unofficial art. He was expelled from classical art educational institutions, and colleagues and peers recognized him as a genius, a miracle for a period of cultural restrictions and prohibitions. It was he who inspired many artists to break with socialist realism. Developing, the contemporary art of the USSR increasingly picked up the latest Western trends, while one of its founders, Oleg Tselkov, at the dawn of his work, preferred to turn to the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the century and, in particular, to the Cubo-Futurists and Fauvists. In his original work, one can also find features close to expressionism and surrealism, but Tselkov’s language itself, based on obvious examples, was exceptional and individual. The first works of Tselkov are full of direct references to the works of Konchalovsky, Matisse,

By the 1980s and 1990s, Tselkov’s style and philosophy were completing the process of formation; he turned to criticism of the “society of spectacles”, the faceless masses. His famous “faces” are both generalized masks, devoid of a soul and driven by a single idea, and people of the future, and archaic images of the past, and philosophers seeking universal happiness for humanity. At the same time, Tselkov himself denied in fictitious images a hint of criticism of totalitarianism, he believed that he was looking much deeper, into the very essence of the personality of modern man. At this stage of his creative path, Tselkov is closer to Western contemporaries - Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon - than to domestic nonconformists who seek to resist ideology.

The retrospective exhibition at MMOMA demonstrates all periods and stages of Oleg Tselkov’s work, and also provides an opportunity to trace the process of formation and apogee of the unique author’s style. The exposition consists of 8 thematic and chronological sections covering the period of Tselkov’s creative activity from the 1950s to the 2020s in more than 100 works from 25 private and museum collections in Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the USA. Specially for the exhibition, the publishing house Kerber (Germany) with the participation of ABC Design (Moscow) published a catalog-reason by Oleg Tselkov, which included about 900 works by the author. The catalog was designed by Dmitry Mordvintsev.

With the support of the AZ Museum, Andrey Cheglakov Foundation, State Tretyakov Gallery.