Inspirational Russian Artists: Past and Present

As a Russian artist in New York, I often keep an eye out for other Russian-international artists: where they’re showing, what is feeding their creativity and how their cultural heritage has influenced their work. In this blog post I list some of the Russian artists that have influenced me in the past and caught my eye in more recent years.

Serge Hollerbach

Serge Hollerbach passed away in 2021. He described his life as an artist as having three periods: "Two brief ones, Russian and European, and a long one – American”. First in Russia, he studied art in high school until 1941 when Nazi Germany attacked and he was sent to work in labor camps in Germany. Upon his liberation in 1945 he went to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. A few years later he arrived in New York City to study and pursue his career as an artist.

His subject as an artist, amongst other things, was painting the inner solitude of city dwellers as the went about their daily lives. He wanted to capture the “truth of life”. The way he sketched scenes and captured a person’s essence, complex group dynamics and characters is what really interested me. His way of working influenced my approach to my figurative works.

In his later years Hollerbach began to lose his vision. Many artists would have considered this as a worst nightmare. Instead, Hollerbach saw it as a new phase of his work. He began to paint using his “inner vision”, using muscle memory. His work became more abstract expressions of life on the Upper West Side. He described this degeneration as freeing him to pursue a creative vision more aligned with his expressionistic roots. In 2018, he was profiled in The New York Times where he stated: “To be playful, you have nothing to lose. Nothing to lose is a new kind of freedom.”

Alexandra Sukhareva

Alexandra Sukhareva is a Russian artist based in Moscow. Her art practice revolves around the historical cycles of toxins within military, daily, and aesthetic realms. She plays with chemical reactions, corrosion, the process of oxidation and toxicity to explore the phenomenology of objects and processes, as well as notions of memory and experience.

An artwork by Sukhareva is currently on show at GES-2 show in Moscow. Titled Beginnings, the artwork is a horometrical artefact. Horometry the practice or method of measuring time using subordinate divisions such as hours and minutes. The artefact itself doesn’t calculate time according to calendar principles but in its nature represents the force of change. Both canvases that make up the artefact are covered in crystals that gradually lose their sheen and hardness. Eventually they turn into a purple powder and fall off the canvas and onto the floor. The rate at which the transition occurs depends on environmental factors such as the humidity, light and surrounding temperature. This work struck me as it’s a reminder of life’s forces that play upon the integrity of any structure.

Dmitry Okruzhnov and Maria Sharova

Dmitry Okruzhnov and Maria Sharova are a Russian creative duet that have been working together since 2012. They were based in Moscow until they recently relocated to Long Island.

Their primary medium is painting. Their process is to build collages digitally with each work made up of digital interpretations of all kinds of technical failures present on the Internet. The paintings represent “Internet ruins” – the decaying habits of modern life and people. The layered painted fragments are built upon one another to represent how time is nonlinear and multilayered. They describe their view of decay and the Internet as shaping our optics of time and space.

Their work RM was exhibited in XL Gallery in Moscow in 2020. This series of paintings represents how a substance follows a natural cycle, it becomes and disintegrates in every moment. This natural occurrence continues with or without man’s interference. As humans fade their waste and tracks of their social lives are lost into the material circulation. As they pass from reality, their existence becomes a network of noise.

Do you have a favorite Russian artist, duo or collective? Leave recommendations in the comments below.