MIKAYIL ABDULLAYEV

Few artists have shaped how a country sees itself as profoundly as Abdullayev shaped Azerbaijan. Across half a century, including the decades of the Soviet era, he helped define the nation’s visual identity: furrowed fields stretching toward the horizon, the dry light of Absheron, and the farmers, water-bearers, and mothers who inhabited these landscapes. These are not backdrops but the very image through which generations have recognised their own land – a visual language so widely absorbed that it now feels less invented than remembered.

Widely celebrated for his depictions of Azerbaijan’s landscapes, people, and cultural life, Abdullayev played a defining role in shaping the nation’s visual language during the Soviet era. His works are distinguished by their profound connection to place, capturing the beauty of Azerbaijan’s natural environment alongside intimate portrayals of everyday life, labour, and tradition. Balancing lyrical sensitivity with a strong sense of national identity, his paintings continue to resonate across generations.

Yet this image of home was forged on the road. Trained in Moscow under Sergei Gerasimov, Abdullayev travelled widely – returning to India across three decades, and on to Italy, Vietnam, and Crimea – and the swift, sunlit works on paper from these journeys reveal how distance sharpened his eye. The light he found abroad is the same light he turned upon his own country; the title The Light of Distant Roads marks that exchange, in which the wider world and the homeland were painted with a single, unwavering gaze. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Baku in many years, the exhibition brings together a significant body of rarely seen works, offering fresh insight into an oeuvre that remains central to the history of Azerbaijani art.

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Mikayil Abdullayev (1921–2002) was among the most celebrated Azerbaijani painters of his generation. After studying under Azim Azimzadeh in Baku, he trained at the V.I. Surikov State Art Institute in Moscow in the studio of Sergei Gerasimov. His landmark Mingechevir Suite series, including The Lights of Mingechevir (1948), was shown in All-Union exhibitions and in Paris, and he returned repeatedly to India and other countries over three decades of travel. Named People’s Artist of the USSR and of Azerbaijan, he was a laureate of the Lenin Award, the State Award of the USSR and the International Jawaharlal Nehru Award, and for many years headed the Department of Painting at the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Art.