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

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  • Provenance

    Flomehaft Gallery, New York; Private Collection, Europe

  • Exhibited

    London, Haunch of Venison, Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s, 16 April–23 June 2010

  • Literature

    Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s, exh. cat., Haunch of Venison, London, 2010, pp. 228–29 (illustrated in colour)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Painted in 1993 by the nonconformist artist Oleg Vassiliev, this work depicts a typical Russian landscape on a rainy day. One of the finest examples from the artist’s oeuvre, it demonstrates the continuance of the Russian 19th century tradition of nostalgic landscape painting, exemplified by Isaac Levitan. The importance of nature for
    Vassiliev is evident, and he lists it among the key subjects that he draws artistic inspiration from: “Again and again, on the quest to establish my perception, I return to the principal themes: memories of home and houses, roads, forests, fields, to my friends, and my family”.
    (Oleg Vassiliev, Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks, Moscow, 2004, p. 83)
     
    Painted after Vassiliev’s relocation to New York, After the Rain exemplifies the tight connection to his native Russia that the artist never lost. His friend and fellow artist Eric Bulatov considers Vassiliev “the most Russian out of all living Russian artists, as he expresses not just one of the properties of Russian art, but its existential core from which the completely different qualities cultivate”.
     
    (Eric Bulatov, quoted in Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks, Moscow, 2004, p. 114)

34

After the Rain

1993
Oil on canvas.
100.6 x 76.2 cm (40 x 30 in).
Initialled in Cyrillic and dated 'OV.93.' lower right; further signed, initialled, titled and dated ''O. Vassiliev./"After the Rain"/OV 93' on the reverse.

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £63,650

BRIC

14 - 15 April 2011
London