Oleg Tselkov - BRIC London Thursday, April 14, 2011 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Private Collection, Russia

  • Literature

    S. Popov, Always Different Art. History of Contemporary Art in Russia. Collection of Viktor Bondarenko, Moscow: Knigi WAM, 2010, p. 296 (illustrated in colour)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “For over 40 years, day after day, I am painting my countless canvas, one after another. Something changed in them, with time, coming out of the light, or sinking into the darkness. But always - always! - these faces, these Portrait of the faces, repeat themselves.”(Oleg Tselkov, quoted from the artist’s website)
     
    “The subject of mutation in Russian culture first appeared in the 1960s in the art by Oleg Tselkov, in his strange mannequins of a person whose flesh has lost its organic nature becoming reminiscent of phantasmagoric bubbles. They originate from Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which evil forces are manifested as ‘bubbles of the Earth’. In Tselkov’s pieces the grotesque emerges from the surrounding reality; the world of totalitarianism, a world of fear and violence pulses in his images, which are seductive in their ideal forms, expanding and bubbling.”
     
    (Virtual art museum, ART4.RU)

29

Head with a Fork

1983–84
Oil on canvas.
100 x 130 cm (39 3/8 x 51 1/4 in).
Signed in Cyrillic ‘Oleg Tselkov’ lower right.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 ‡♠

Sold for £73,250

BRIC

14 - 15 April 2011
London