Vladimir Yankilevsky - Price on request

Vladimir Yankilevsky (1938-2018)

Triptych No. 10, Anatomy of the Soul, II, 1970

Signed and titled in Cyrillic and dated 1970 on the reverse of each panel

Oil and acrylic on fibreboard and wood

Overall dimensions: 100 by 439.5 by 24cm 

Provenance:

Collection of the artist

The Schoeni Collection, Hong Kong

Phillips London, BRIC Sale, 23-24 April 2010, lot 244

Private Collection, USA

Private Collection, United Kingdom 

Exhibited:

New York, San Francisco, 1988. Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts. Retrospective: Vladimir Yankilevsky 

The triptychs form an essential body of work in Yankilevsky´s oeuvre. From 1961 and throughout nearly half a century the artist went back to this genre again and again.  Perhaps more than any of his Russian contemporaries it has become a hallmark of his work. Yankilevsky was a late 20th century, post-modernist painter in search of ways to explore the new relationship between figurative and abstract art. What had quickly became two seemingly autonomous disciplines within visual art, the figurative and the abstract have become as divisive as religion and politics. During the late 20th century they were themselves both highly politicised and socially polarised. Yankilevsky sought to address these divisions in his art, and from the mid 1960s he often began to see duality in general as perfectly symbolised by the feminine and the masculine, with their rapprochement following a fall from grace even, a lost harmony.

Early on Yankilevsky started using a three part composition called a  triptych - which finds parallels in the Russian sacred tradition of icon painting - as a way of expressing his questions about visual art in the wake of modernism.  Using wood to create constructions in relief on a large scale, such as the offered work, he elongates the original form of a triptych (the side wings were originally conceived to close covering the central panel like doors) to the extreme. Here, in Triptych No 10, the two wings represent male and female forms, both clearly figurative although reduced to basic shapes, connected by a long drawing: the central panel which just consists of horizontal lines. Here Yankilevsky further disturbs the dissonance by deliberate destruction: at each end we see what appears to have been a top, surface layer, crudely ripped at either end, it almost looks broken and in need of repair. The female and male duality is also suggested here as a division between body and mind and the head is depicted facing outwards, as if looking away.

The offered work is triptych No. 10.  Six of the first ten triptychs are in museum collections, including Tate Modern, London, the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey, USA.  Triptych No 10, executed in 1970, was exhibited at the Nakhamkin Gallery in New York in 1988, the artist´s first solo show outside Russia and a rare photograph in the family´s archive shows the artist standing in front of the offered work, with musician Igor Vysotsky and his wife. There is a page dedicated to this triptych in the artist´s notebooks, ´Albums Automonographiques. 1954-1980´, and two known sketches relating to it in the family archives.

Image credits to the family of the artist.