Evgeny Chubarov was a Russian artist who developed an idiosyncratic visual language from his early figurative paintings and ink drawings, as well as sculptures, to later explorations of abstraction.
Read MoreBorn in the village of Nizhneye Bobino, Russia (then the U.S.S.R.), Chubarov initially studied jewellery design and weapons engraving at a metal engraving vocational school in Zlatoust. In 1959, working in sculptor Dmitry Tsaplin's restoration studio, the artist began to develop his interest in the simplified forms that appear often in his early works.
A sense of dynamic, sometimes aggressive, rhythm pulses throughout Evgeny Chubarov's works, which encompass painting, ink compositions, and sculpture.
Chubarov's early figurative works from the 1970s and 80s typically show multiple human figures cramped into the frame of the canvas. A group of nude figures raise their arms and charge forward in an untitled oil painting from 1982, while contorted bodies appear in the ink-on-paper work Untitled (1987). With thick torsos and limbs, and abstracted facial features, Chubarov's figures are far from the idealised nudes of classical paintings and foreshadow the artist's engagement with abstraction.
During the so-called Soviet Period of Chubarov's life, before he left for Berlin and New York in the early 1990s, the artist led a relatively quiet career, exhibiting in few exhibitions. First living in Berlin for five years, then settling in New York in 1996, Chubarov increasingly shifted towards monumental abstract paintings.
Chubarov favoured colour palettes of black and white or vivid colours—such as red, yellow, green, and blue—that he applied to the canvas with both a paintbrush and a squeegee. Like his earlier figurative paintings, Chubarov's abstractions lack a single vantage point. In an untitled painting made between 1992 and 1993, for example, the colours result in a sense of harmony in lieu of a primary focal point. A yellow background is balanced out by a smattering of squiggly red lines, which are scattered throughout the canvas among other lines in white, blue, and green and small stripes.
A year after the artist's passing in 2012, the Chubarov Foundation was established to collect and preserve his work.
Evgeny Chubarov exhibited internationally in his lifetime, and his works continue to be presented in solo and group exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions include Evgeny Chubarov. Line Matters, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, online exhibition (2020); Evgeny Chubarov: The Berlin Works, Osthaus-Museum Hagen (2016); Evgeny Chubarov, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow (2015); 80th Anniversary of Evgeny Chubarov, National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow (2014).
Select group exhibitions include Price of Oil, Gary Tatintsian Gallery (2009); Kazimir Malevich's Birthday, Art Center DOM, Moscow (2003); Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Eugene Chubarov, Tatunz Gallery, New York (1999).
The Evgeny Chubarov Foundation website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
