Vladimir Sergeevich Sulyagin
Vladimir Sergeevich Sulyagin (born 1942, Nizhny Tagil) is a Russian artist, both a practitioner and theorist of art. He considers himself a representative of the Moscow intellectual school with a strong interest in art of various eras, including Russian icons. His work shows influences of avant-garde, minimalism, constructivism, and conceptualism. For about 20 years, he has been working on the theme of 'images of time today.' He has written two monographs (unpublished).
Biography
Born in 1942 in Nizhny Tagil, USSR. Served in the Soviet Army from 1963 to 1966. In 1967, he entered the Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry, graduating in 1972 with a specialty in Artistic Ceramics. For over 10 years, he worked as a monumental artist with the RSFSR Art Fund, creating stained glass and reliefs—murals and mosaics for institutions in Moscow and surrounding areas.
The specialty of a monumental artist was broadest, and the time at Stroganov offered a range of techniques, materials, and technologies—this became the basis for the next stage of his life and, most importantly, his soul's need.
Since 1980, he has been engaged in easel painting. From 1988, he became a freelance artist. In 1989, he participated in the group exhibition 'Russian Soul' in Austria. In 1990, several of his three-dimensional wooden collages were sold at the Dorotheum art auction in Vienna.
In the mid-1980s, he worked in collage and created a series of minimalist paper portraits depicting poets, writers, artists, and figures from Russian and world culture. In 1990, the "Russian Collection" association led by Nikolay Shchukin organized a group exhibition in London featuring his works. With the support of the British, a series of solo exhibitions 'Writers under Stalin' took place in the UK the following year, at the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, exhibiting Sulyagin's collage work.
From materials of heroic, almost childlike simplicity, he created something eloquent, new, and expressive. Marina Tsvetaeva becomes a gleaming silver icon of power and immortality, a silver image of a poet of the great Silver Age. Here are wit, style, and energy. The large gray-green nose and quirky glasses of Nabokov, the golden eyes of symbolist Fyodor Sologub, the orange ear of an irritated Ivan Bunin, and the cheerfully shining silver teeth of Nobel laureate, physicist-chess player Pyotr Kapitsa add humor and even cheerfulness to this memorable sequence.
In 1992, the book 'Paper Spirits: Collage Portraits by Vladimir Sulyagin' was published in the UK, edited by Hilary Spurling, biographer of Henri Matisse:
Vladimir Sulyagin grew up in a world of shadows—poets whose names were never mentioned, writers whose books were unpublished, painters whose works no one had seen. For many years he sought a way to represent those faces that did not fit the Soviet standard of busts and official portraits. Eventually, he began cutting them out of wrapping paper—gray or brown, with flecks of black, red, or silver foil, trying to capture the spirit and inner essence of people who officially did not exist or whose appearance, both external and internal, was distorted and varnished: Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, Sakharov, Mandelstam, and many others.
Since the 1980s, the artist has created assembled books of drawings and spatially intricate book objects from paper and cardboard. His books were highly praised by English writer and rare book collector Colin Franklin:
I was struck by Vladimir Sulyagin's books, an artist whose collage portraits now have been exhibited and recognized in England. Even during the Brezhnev era, he began making books from cut pieces of paper and cardboard, developing a branch of collage technique that traces back to Matisse and Malevich.
Later, his works in the 'artist's book' genre entered private and museum collections, including the Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA) and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
Text appears in [Sulyagin's books] at the level of the sign, the letter. There is no border between text and image; all visual signs are drawn into an endless game where reference to reality becomes almost impossible.
In 1996, he participated in the UN competition among Russian artists 'My Russia... My World'. Sulyagin's collage 'Parental Saturday' took second place. However, due to financial and organizational problems, the UN canceled the exhibition of the best works in New York.
In 1997, he became set designer for Vladimir Mirzoev's play 'Pigeons', written by Mikhail Ugarov.
Since 1998, Sulyagin has been experimenting with representing space and time on a flat surface. In his new paintings and graphic works, he searched for 'the total essence of time as a form'. Over the next twelve years, this idea developed in the handwritten 'ARTEPICA' books: theoretical works on perspective, space, time, and 'the epic in art'. In them, the artist uses figurative-poetic texts, drawings, photos, and paintings to explain and demonstrate his findings, opening up a new artistic perspective for sophisticated readers. During the same period, he assembled collections of photographs and ink drawings in the 'epic' genre, continuing to use his found techniques, as well as writing the handwritten monograph 'Color as Form', in which, based on Johannes Itten's academic work on color, Sulyagin conducts parallel research.
In 1999, a group exhibition 'The Artist's Book. Russia. 1970—1990' took place at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, featuring Sulyagin's works. Cooperation with the museum continued with group exhibitions 'Collage in Russia. 20th century' (2003) and 'Latest Arrivals' (2005). Several of his works were accepted into the museum collection.
In 2007, another series of solo exhibitions 'Russian Soul' was held in Austria, with works from various years displayed.
By 2010, Sulyagin arrived at his own understanding of contemporary painting through a new color pair: 'red—as the actual, gold—as a mysterious symbol of eternity.' He created series of works in this new, for him, style: 'To take something from the tense reality that excites with almost absurd simplicity and even wild freshness.'
He participated in the BookExpo America 2012 in New York, as part of the group exhibition 'Experimental Art of Children's Book Illustration in Russia (20th–21st century)'.
In 2012, he collaborated with the Moscow contemporary art gallery 'Azarnova Gallery & Projects.'
In 2012, the collection of Georges Machere and Nadia Volkonskaya of 848 envelopes (created in the 1980s–2000s by artists of the so-called 'Second Russian Avant-Garde') was transferred to the State Hermitage Museum. It included 11 envelopes by Vladimir Sulyagin.
Since 2015, he collaborates with the 55Bellechasse Gallery (France), exhibiting his paintings and collages in Paris. The gallery regularly participates in contemporary art fairs in Europe, the USA, and Russia, including the Cosmoscow 2017 international contemporary art fair in Moscow.
Solo Exhibitions
2016 Solo exhibition "Faces", 55Bellechasse Gallery, Paris, France
2012 Solo exhibition "Illusions and Things", Azarnova Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2010—2011 Solo exhibition "Brutal Romanticism in Office Space", Grant Thornton Corporate Art Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2007 Solo exhibition "Russian Soul", Sensenwerk Gallery, Deutschfeistritz, Austria
1996 Solo exhibition "Parental Saturday", Phoenix Cultural Center, Moscow, Russia
1995 Solo exhibition "Birthday", Phoenix Cultural Center, Moscow, Russia
1992—2012 Solo exhibition "Painting, Collage, Books", East—West Gallery, London, UK
1992 Solo exhibition "Writers under Stalin", Literature Festival, Cheltenham, UK
1992 Solo exhibition "Writers under Stalin", Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK
1991 Solo exhibition "Writers under Stalin", as part of "Russian Spring" events, Royal Festival Hall, London, UK
Group Exhibitions
2019 Group exhibition "FRAME Art Fair Paris", organized by Gallery 55Bellechasse, Paris, France
2017 "Scope New York" contemporary art fair, exhibited by Gallery 55Bellechasse (France), New York, USA
2017 "Cosmoscow" contemporary art fair, exhibited by Gallery 55Bellechasse (France), Gostiny Dvor, Moscow, Russia
2017 Group exhibition "Pancake Clouds", 7th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (parallel program), KINO Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2016 Group exhibition "Duet and Dialogue of Masters: Janos Kalmar and Vladimir Sulyagin", 55Bellechasse Gallery, Paris, France
2012 Group exhibition "Experimental Art of Children's Book Illustration in Russia (20th–21st century)", BookExpo America, New York, USA
2012 Group exhibition "Dialogues: Mikhail Molochnikov and Vladimir Sulyagin", Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia
2005 Group exhibition "Latest Arrivals", Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
2003 Group exhibition "Collage in Russia", Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
1999 Group exhibition "Artist's Book. Russia. 1970—1990", Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
1998 Group exhibition "Poetry and Photography", A3 Gallery, Moscow, Russia
1997 Group exhibition "Hero of Our Time", Phoenix Cultural Center, Moscow, Russia
1995 Group exhibition "Carnival", Nina Gallery, Central House of Artists, Moscow, Russia
1995 Group exhibition "Book Garden: Contemporary Book Artists", John Rylands Library, Manchester, UK
1994 Group exhibition "Books Like Drugs", Hamburg, Germany
1994 Third International Artist's Book and Print Exhibition, Leipzig, Germany
1993 Group exhibition "Adresse Provisoire: Contemporary Art of Russia", Postal Museum, Paris, France
1993 Group exhibition "Russian and Soviet Artist's Book. 1910—1993", Userch, France
1993 Group exhibition "Paper Theater II", Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House, St. Petersburg, Russia
1992 Group exhibition "Paper Theater", Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House, St. Petersburg, Russia
1989 Group exhibition "Russian Soul", Graz, Austria
1989 Group exhibition "Collection '89", House of Soviet Culture and Science, Helsinki, Finland
1987 Group exhibition "Studies on Books", Central House of Art Workers, Moscow, USSR
Works in Collections
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA
East—West Gallery, London, UK
Lyrik Kabinett Foundation, Munich, Germany
KINO Gallery, Moscow, Russia
And other private collections.
Works 27
