Oleg Kudryashov

The Tate Gallery, London, UK
The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA
Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, USA
Boumans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Print Collection, National Gallery of Art, Dresden, Germany
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Wakefield Art Gallery, Wakefield
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Scotland
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Trinity College, Dublin, UK
State Library of Saltykov-Schedrin, St. Petersburg
State Museum of Literature, Moscow
Collection of the City New-Ulm, Germany
Grafische Sammlung, Schaetzier Palais, Augsburg, Germany
The Arts Council of Great Britain
Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1974 Hoyerswerda (Sachsen), The Cultural Club Gallery. A selection from the Print Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Dresden, Germany
1975 Acme Gallery, London, UK
1982 Robert Brown Contemporary Art, Washington, USA
(Following exhibitions in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995)
1983 Riverside Studios
1984 Coracle Press Gallery, London, UK
1986, -88, -91 Patrick Cramer Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland
1986 Albert Totah Gallery, New York, USA
1987 St. Paul's Gallery, Leeds
1987 Marlene Eleini Gallery, London, UK
1988 The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Scotland
1989 Roger Ramsey Gallery, Chicago, USA
1990 Central House of Artists, Moscow
1991, -93 Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery, London, UK
1992 Saint-Cuillaume Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
1992 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
1995 Dimock Gallery, The George Washington University, Washington, USA
1997 Robert Brown Contemporary Art, Washington, USA
1997 Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, USA
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1958, -59, -66 Exhibitions of young Moscow artists, Moscow
1961-72 Exhibitions of Moscow artists, Moscow
1965 Printmaking Biennale, Ljubljana. Yugoslavia
1966 Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
1966 "Russian Art from Antiquity to the Present", Paris, France
1970, -71 All-Union Art Exhibition, Moscow
1971 "Soviet Graphic Art", Kiel, Germany
1976 Printmaking Biennale, Paris, France
1981 "The Classical Moderns," Gmurzynska Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1983 Third International Biennale of European Graphic Art, Baden-Baden
1983-84 "One of a Kind", Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore; Air Gallery, London and tour, UK
1985 "Double Elephant", The Barbican Centre, London, UK
1985 "Landscape Interior", Coracle Press Gallery, London, UK
1986 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Peter Moores Foundation, Project No. 8, Liverpool
1987 European Triennial of Engraving, Grado, Italy
1989 "Prints from the Collection Joshua P. Smith", National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA
1990 "The Unique Print—70s into 90s", Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
1993 "Late 20th Century Prints", Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
1993 "Four Sculptures", Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery
1995 "Utopia", Shchukin State Museum Archive, Moscow

...In his works, Kudryashov breaks traditional boundaries between printmaking, painting, and sculpture. Kudryashov draws on a zinc plate as if it were paper, and treats etching paper like metal, using its rigidity to cut and bend, creating constructions from it.

The relief elements both repeat and develop the theme of the print on which the relief is based. This allows Kudryashov to create an even more complex range of spatial relationships. The implied space, drawing, hatching, color, and light of the print visually interact with the three-dimensional forms, the play of light and shadow of the construction in real space.

As a result of working on this theme, Kudryashov has created an enormous variety of versions. In some, the volumetric elements are closely attached to the surface of the print; in others, large and complex constructions dynamically enter space and barely touch the print's surface. Since 1983, elements of irregular forms made of thinner paper, which the artist crumples, cuts, paints, and twists, have been introduced into the spatial interaction of geometric forms.

In 1988, Kudryashov entered a new phase: "I started thinking about sculpture and now I can't stop... It has become the most important thing for me. I want to move forward"...

While Kudryashov's interest in structural compositions evokes Cubism and the Russian Avant-Garde, the emotional charge contained in his strokes suggests a kinship with American Abstract Expressionism.

Kudryashov's works possess and arouse in us, in the broadest sense, a new sensation of space. The beauty, power, and originality of his images express his own unique vision, revealing to us the poetry and despair of the surrounding world.

Kristina Lodder
University of St. Andrews, Scotland
"Drawing in Space"
Exhibition Catalog at the Central House of Artists, Moscow, 1990

Kudryashov himself... never engaged in clever tricks or subtle revelations. A remarkably organic and spontaneous master, he drew as if possessed, creating a continuous graphic flow, of which "Glupov" formed only a small island.

Kudryashov's folktale-like graphic expression (imagine Leskov befriending Jackson Pollock, and you will get some idea of what this is) finds its final embodiment in a video based on his early "army" drawings. More precisely, based on their reproductions, since almost all originals were burned on the eve of departure...

However hard, even monstrous, the life recalled by Kudryashov the "director", the entire "comic" is filled with sparks of indestructible folk vitality. One cannot imagine a sad Bogorodskaya toy—likewise, there are no minor frames in Kudryashov's "Soldateska". To the sound of retro (tango and foxtrots of the unforgettable Peter Leshchenko era), the stream of bitter-sweet, tragicomic existence pulsates, sometimes gathering into a lump, sometimes flying apart in tatters, splashing with that inseparable essence of earthly life, so difficult to capture in visual art...
ON THE RUINS OF UTOPIA – ON THE COMPOSITIONS
OF OLEG KUDRYASHOV
Dr. M. Sokolov, Art Critic
KNOWLEDGE, People's University
MAN AND NATURE, 1/1992