Oleg Tselkov (1934-2021) one of the most highly regarded Russian nonconformist artists, created an artistic language that was easily recognizable. The famous American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), who was introduced to Tselkov on a visit to Russia in 1967, once referred to the “tragic power” of Tselkov’s portraits, while poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) described the artist as “the most remarkable Russian painter of the post-war period.” Another important Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932-2017) characterized Tselkov’s paintings as “faceless uniformity,” an “anti-totalitarian philosophy of a brush, a condemnation of conformity.”
For over fifty years, Tselkov produced his trademark images: distorted, mask-like heads reminiscent of anthropomorphic, monstrous mutants. The artist always rejected narrative content, focusing instead on emotional evocation. Tselkov’s metaphorical characters are sometimes depicted with motifs taken from daily life, such as a hat, a fan, a candle; at other times, they are portrayed with a cat or a butterfly. Tselkov’s carefully selected objects add rich associations, intensifying the force of his tragic characters who are metaphors for the human condition. Tselkov never strived for lifelikeness or specificity of his figures - his faces are representative of humankind. As the artist noted, he tried to make his social commentaries universal, creating works “that would have the same impact everywhere.”
A major influence on Tselkov’s work is found in Surrealism - as seen in the artist’s strikingly disproportionate scale, deliberate incongruity of images, and the presence of biomorphic shapes. In their abstraction of the human figure and exaggeration of isolated anatomical features, some of Tselkov’s works are related to the sculpture of Henry Moore (1898-1986), an important force in the English Surrealist movement. While the Surrealist evocations in Tselkov’s work contribute to the enduring appeal of his oeuvre, they may also partly account for the artist’s difficult relationship with the Soviet authorities, because Surrealism was one of the leading targets of the Soviet anti-modernist campaigns.
