VLADIMIR NEMUKHIN

Vladimir Nikolaevich Nemukhin (Russian: Владимир Николаевич Немухин; February 12, 1925 in village Priluki, Kaluga Oblast, RSFSR, USSR – April 18, 2016 Moscow, Russia) was a Russian artist. Nemukhin was associated with the ‘Lianozovo Group’ along with Oscar Rabin, Valentina Kropivnitskaya (1924-2008) and Lidiya Masterkova.

In the 1950s when Russia, under Nikita Khrushchev, enjoyed a slightly more permissive cultural climate, Nemukhin was one of the artists who searched for new ways of expression. Rejecting the Socialist Realism that was the only approved artistic form allowed in the Soviet Union at the time, ‘unofficial’ artists like Nemukhin formed their own ways of portraying the world around them. Their art tended to be concerned with universal values and was highly individual in nature, leading to a constant battles with censorship authorities. Nemukhin played an important role in these confrontations as, being a significant personality in the Moscow art world of the 1960s and 1970s, he served as a negotiator between the artists and the state.

Nemukhin’s work is predominantly abstract and very personal. According to Julia Tulovsky, Assistant Curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum, “Nemukhin is best known for his abstract still lifes with playing cards, fragments of card tables, and fighting cocks … In a majority of cases, these symbolize accident, intrigue, and indeterminacy, contrasting with the doctrine of predetermination demanded by the Soviet establishment. Nemukhin intends his structures, surfaces and symbols to reveal the spiritual, the unreal, the emotionally obscure, and the existential.”