Salnikov Vladimir
1948 - Born in Chita
1959 - Enrolled in the art studio at the Palace of Pioneers, Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg).
1959-61 - Attended the Children's Art School at the Sverdlovsk Art School, Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg).
1961-66 - Studied at the Art Studio at the Orenburg branch of the Artists' Union of the RSFSR
1966-1971 - Faculty of Artistic and Technical Design of Printed Materials, Moscow Printing Institute (now Academy of Printing).
1971 - Graduated from the Graphic Arts Faculty of the Moscow Printing Institute
1971-88 - Worked as an illustrator in Moscow publishing houses
1972-82 - Teacher of drawing, painting, and composition at the Graphic Arts Faculty of the Moscow Printing Institute
1980 - Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR (now Moscow Union of Artists).
1997-2000 - Lecturer at the School of Contemporary Art, RSUH.
2000 - Member of the editorial board of the "Art Journal."
Since 2003 – Member of the "Lifshitz Institute"
Lives in Moscow
Works in collections
State Museum of V.V. Mayakovsky, Moscow, Russia
Nizhny Tagil Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, Sverdlovsk region, Russia
Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia
Oryol Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Oryol, Russia
Stavropol Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Stavropol, Russia
Tomsk Regional Art Museum, Tomsk, Russia
Museum of 20th Century Art, Lodz, Poland
Museum of Czech Literature, Prague, Czech Republic
Museum of Peoples' Friendship, Tbilisi, Georgia
Collection of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Collection of Eric A. Peschler, Zurich, Switzerland
Exhibitions and auctions
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006 - "20th Century in Photographs", Paperworks Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2005 - "10,000 Left Female Ears", Russian Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
2004 - "Studies with Lenin", NCCA, Moscow
2002 - "Vladimir Salnikov" (as part of the project "Archiving the Present"), Krokin Gallery, Moscow
"Inventory of History" (with Nina Kotel), Regional History Museum, Togliatti, Russia
2001 - "Premapping of Desire" TV Gallery, Moscow
"Touching History. Lifestyle – Journey" (with Nina Kotel), Union Gallery, Moscow
1997 - "Spaces Rescued by Us Are Subject to Will and Reason," Art Media Center "TV Gallery" and Contemporary Art Center, Moscow
"Lifestyle – Journey. Pyramid" (with Nina Kotel), Union Gallery, Moscow
1999 - "Preserved Landscape. On the Ruins of Genre", Union Gallery, Moscow
1995 - "Rescue of Spaces," TV Gallery, Moscow
"Thoughts," Studio 20 Gallery, Moscow
"Rescue of Spaces," Seminar "Man in the Age of Electronic Technologies," TV Gallery, NCCA, Moscow
1994 - "Victory and Defeat. The Artist Hitler's Niece," Institute of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg
"Victory and Defeat," Obscuri viri Gallery, Moscow
"Holly-leaved Forest," Studio 20 Gallery, Moscow
1993 - "Trusting Husband," Velta Gallery, Moscow
1992 - "Teaching the Body" (with M. Mikhalchuk), Institute of Philosophy RAS, Moscow
"Artist and Critic," Studio 20 Gallery, Moscow
PROJECTS:
1997 - "Salon Digital," an online action, Center for Art and Media Technologies in Karlsruhe, EXPO-2000 Germany, Goethe Institut, Moscow, Art Media Center "TV Gallery", Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow
1994 - "Die Sonderkinderstube," "Poisonous Money," "Jasenovica," all projects jointly with Nina Kotel, Visual Anthropology Workshop, Center for Contemporary Art, Artistic Director Valery Podoroga, Moscow
"Project of the Ideal Russian State," with Nina Kotel, Action "Moscow Pool", Moscow Pool, Moscow
1993 - "Indorossiya," with Nina Kotel, Contemporary Art Center Laboratory, Moscow
VIDEO FILMS:
2001 - "Dancing Siva and His Adept"
2000 - "Premapping of Desire"
GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
[...List continues as above; due to length constraints, only representative examples shown here. The original Russian text includes a comprehensive list of exhibitions from 1987 to 2005.]
(Full list available upon request)
Author about himself
What am I even doing in art? Moving somewhere—under the influence of hardly traceable and certainly uncontrollable forces: curiosity and a reluctance to fit into the general framework. To make sure, God forbid, that I don't unwittingly blend in—I keep an eye on my own silhouette: how does it look against the general background? Naturally, this is accompanied by some difficulties, though not yet fatal ones. However, at least I do not rot alive, which would surely happen if I began to strictly follow all the rules and prohibitions that define the configuration of a contemporary Moscow artist. I allow myself at one and the same time to compose geopolitical theories, deliver television sermons (according to the doctrine of "Saving Spaces" that I myself invented), do portraiture, paint nudes symbolizing the Beautiful—which the Soviet regime was based on. Not being or becoming abstract, simply calculable, accounted for, convenient, easily coded—that is art for me. To avoid all this, to stay infantile, capricious, voluntaristic, and schizoid, to behave like a prima donna, i.e., to have the right to be regressive—that is art for me. And how to achieve this is already philosophy. Being in art means being in the womb.
Critic
It is unlikely that any artists around us today are as interested in portraiture as Vladimir Salnikov. We are used—as painting tradition teaches us—to the idea that a portrait is a kind of instantaneous snapshot, a painterly cast of a face, even if the final image accumulates traces of many sessions as the desired image gradually emerges. However, for Vladimir Salnikov, the portrait is primarily a genre task, the construction each time, along with the emerging image, of its genre framework, a compositional container. But not in the sense that everything needs to be balanced and composed for a visually pleasing composition (though that is also considered); the point is that the possibilities of the genre itself are explored in parallel with the emerging image. Hence, the 'realism' or 'realistic quality' of these works lies not so much in the likeness (which the artist also masters), but in how the sought likeness is integrated into a specially found genre. In other words, the likeness depends on its pictorial organization, dictated by a concrete object, on the method used (often invented in the process), and finally on the unpredictability of what such 'use' will ultimately produce. The genre is born, or rather happens, along with each new work—and that genre is, again, the portrait.
When I talk about Vladimir Salnikov’s portraits, I mean not only literal portraits—mainly of women, by the way—but also paintings not formally considered portraits. His large canvases depicting parts of the female body, whose massiveness is curiously softened by the ephemeral gauzy material (smoky muslin covering the series), are also portraits. Even the hieroglyphic compositions, consisting of rows of arbitrarily painted signs, are a kind of portrait—a portrait laid out in fractional elements, seemingly unrelated to the face, yet foundational to the image. One could say that these are portraits of the elements of the depictable.
Now the question arises: what does 'portrait' mean? I suppose the very structure of the genre already inscribes a face, marks its main coordinates. Even if there is no literal face, it is the primal schema (along with our body) through which we orient and move in the world, like a coordinate grid that receives and returns all our projections. Vladimir Salnikov seems to constantly ask: how do our encounters with the world occur, how do we meet and recognize each other, how do we master things, inhabit landscapes? He addresses invisible but rigid structures at the core of our existence, exploring the portrait as a path we create and that is also created for us. The artist reenacts what is usually done automatically, doubting everything that consciousness, obeying the economy of effort, relegates to bodily automatism. With each piece, he rediscovers the path of a person in the world, as well as the schema enabling its representation, including pictorially. Salnikov always holds both poles: the depicted and the mechanism of depiction itself, that is, what moves toward identification, but for now remains free of it.
It is no accident that in seeking the portrait as not yet a given, freeing its very foundations, the artist also offers us his own face, showing it on a screen as the face of someone preaching. This magnified, living-in-time face, prone to the play of random expressions, is unique and yet universal—again a split and a challenge: face as schema and as fleeting excess of the living. The painted portrait seems to balance on this edge—Salnikov reminds us how portrait becomes portrait.
E. Petrovskaia
Bibliography
Eric A. Peschler, "Studios of Moscow Contemporary Drawings" Paris Editions Enrico Navarra, Galerie de France 1989, pp. 113-123
Galina Elshveskaya, "The New Graphic Arts Album" M. "Soviet Artist" 1991 pp. 11, 66, 171, 180, 181
"The Underground Joined the Establishment" - interview with Maria Chagodaeva, "Moskovskie Novosti" #20 1992
"Vladimir Salnikov Showed the Female Body" "Kommersant-Daily" #52 1993
Lyudmila Lunina "The Nude" "Stolitsa" #5 1993 p.43
Andrey Kovalev "Spring Sketches: What is Love" "Segodnya" 21.05.1993
Andrey Kovalev "Attraction of the Classics" "Segodnya" #38 1993
Sergey Epikhin "Vladimir Salnikov 'Cadeau'" "Art Magazine" #2 1993 p.53
Vladislav Kornev "Lotta in the Reichstag" "Segodnya" #91 1994
Lyudmila Lunina "The Sea Left the Sharpness of the Running Wave on Her Face" "Segodnya" #91 1994
Vladislav Kornev "Tableau noir, or All in the Board," "Segodnya" #101 1995
Elena Petrovskaia "Art of Recording," "Segodnya" #101 1995
Nina Kostyuchkova "Art with the People and Without" "Segodnya" #120 1995
Igor Dudinsky "The 'M-E' Reviewer Peed Next to Seva Novgorodtsev" "Megapolis-Express" #43 1995
Lyudmila Lunina "Give in to Your Desires" "Segodnya" #210 1995
Stas Solovkin "Save Our Ears" "Novaya Gazeta" 7-13.10.1996
Yana Zhilyaeva "Women's Ears Are Now Prettier Than Faces" "Moskovsky Komsomolets" 29.12.1996
Elena Panteleeva "Can't See as Far as Your Own Ears? Ancient!" Elle, Feb 1997
Fedor Romer "Art for All Contingents" "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" 20.03.1997
Ekaterina Degot "A Bad Artist Doesn't Want to Become Kashpirovsky" "Kommersant-Daily" #32 1997
Ilya Falkovsky "Virtual Guru" "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" 28.03.1997
Fedor Romer "The Space We Save Is Subject to Will and Feeling" "Art Diary," May 1997
Milena Orlova "Remember Everything and Forget Immediately" "Kommersant" #9 29.01.1999
Ivan Liberov "The Critic-Copier" "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" 26.06.1999
Natalya Smirnova "How to Draw a Bird" "In the World of Books" #10 1983 pp. 37-39, 42, 43
"In the Studio of Artist Vladimir Salnikov," "Children’s Literature" magazine, N9, 1983;
"In the Studio of Artist Vladimir Salnikov," "Druzhba Narodov" magazine, N2, 1988;
Aleksei Ivanenko "Graphic Mystery" "Kultura i Zhizn" #3 1984 insert, p.33
Yury Gerchuk "Assertion of the Graphic Artist," "Tvorchestvo" #4 1989 p.3
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