YURI ZLOTNIKOV

Exhibition of the artworks by the prominent Moscow artist Yuri Zlotnikov in the Russian Museum included circa 200 paintings and graphic works.

Yuri Zlotnikov trained in the Moscow Municipal Art School attached to the Academy of Arts of the USSR. After graduating he worked as artist-designer at the All-Russian Exhibition Centre (VVC).

In 1950s Zlotnikov created the large-scale cycle of graphic works that was called the Signal System. The artist studied a nature of art, mechanism and specific character of the self’s reaction on colour and form.

Alongside an abstraction the artist created a figurative painting.

The artist’s self-portraits look unconventional on the background of the beginning of the 1960s works of art. For that time they were very audacious both in a specific depicting and in manner of creation. In a number of the lists he broke the moral taboo of the Soviet epoch. He depicted himself naked and didn’t adorn his body.

In the 1960s and 1970s Zlotnikov created equally graphic works and paintings. In the 1970s he turned from psychophysiology of the Signals to the metaphoric big spatial compositions.

Now the artist creates the Composition and Structure cycles.