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Eugeny Chubarov (11 December 1934 - 5 December 2012) was a Russian painter, sculptor, graphic artist.

Early life
Eugeny Chubarov almost didn’t go to school, working on a collective farm pasturing colts as a teenager. His passion for painting appeared in childhood, partly under the influence of his father. In his youth, Chubarov wanted to get prestigious profession and went to his his uncle’s house in Zlatoust. He went to vocational school there where he studied to become a jeweler, a decorator of decorative weapons. After graduating from the school, Chubarov entered the army and served five years in the Baltic Fleet.

1950s — 60s
In 1959, Chubarov went to Saratov and then to Zagorsk (now - Sergiev Posad, where he worked at a restoration workshop. In 1961, he got married and lived with his wife Lyudmila Gukovich in rented rooms which they had found by chance. At that time she was a pediatrician who worked in Istra.

in 1963, his paintings “March” and “Factory Landscape” (views of the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant) appeared at an exhibition of young artists in Moscow. “Factory Landscape” was published in Iskusstvo (“Art”) magazine just a few months after the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, had visited an exhibition for the 30th Anniversary of the Moscow Regional Council of Soviet Painters at the Manezh, where he had criticized artists who were focused on the European avant-garde. In this years Chubarov conceived a passion for wooden sculpture. He got the material he needed thanks to useful contacts with an engineer from a brick factory in Zagorsk. According to the artist’s wife, those were life-size portraits that resembled photos of the victims of Auschwitz.

Paintings and graphics of 60-s clearly show artist's interest in Eros, both physical and psychological. The canvas (1969) where woman sits on the lap of man. The man has dark green square with carelessly childishly outlined eyes and a mouth. The treatment of male characters as geometric shadows can be found in other works of that period. Chubarov understands the male as an impersonal work in progress. It is the basic stage of production of subconscious impulses.

1970s — 80s
In the 1970 and 1980s, Chubarov moved from simple compositions towards a new interpretation of relations between painting and body. Artist worked on his famous series of powerful multi-figure ink compositions on paper. Compositionally, his work inherits “Christ Carrying the Cross” by Bosch (1515-1516), the expressionism of Boris Grigoriev in his “Faces of Russia” (1920-30s) and Pavel Filonov’s analytical experiments. If Chubarov had previously painted some characters in easily readable relations, in the 70s and 80s, he created situations with maximal tightness and filled the canvas with more and more faces and bodies which were rarely bound by a common storyline.

In "Fight" (1982), Chubarov equates the surface of the canvas to the body and skin, erasing the border between the figurative and the body. Later that understanding of the surface of the canvas helped him move to the ultimate objectlessness. The motives of “Fight” would remain throughout the artist’s period of pure abstraction and would move into many of his drawings.

Other paintings of the 1980s are full of references to hidden and demonstrative sexuality — from the image of a gravedigger to characters with chopped off limbs or signs of rigor mortis on their faces.

For several decades, Chubarov had been working on series of sculptures made of stone. At the Sculpture Park in Moscow, there is a composition consisting of 283 stone heads. The heads form a separate wall covered with bars; the structure, as well as the meaning of the work – a monument to victims of Stalinist repression – did not originate from the artist. It was created by the Park administration, which accepted these sculptures as a gift in the mid-1990s.

In 1986, Chubarov was admitted to the Union of Artists.

Years abroad
The Soviet part of Chubarov’s biography is not so rich in external events, and there is no evidence that the artist tried to become part of the underground. His name did not appear on the list of those artists who tried to exhibit independently.

At the invitation of art dealer Gary Tatintsian, he traveled to Berlin and New York where his style underwent its last transformation. Chubarov moved from Impressionism to pure abstraction and succeeded. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and participated in exhibitions on equal footing with the greatest artists of the post-war generation. Chubarov came to abstraction at the moment when it stopped being a political gesture of emancipation from the formal requirements of art. Such a late step beyond the narrative art emphasizes his internal independence from the artistic context he had to work in. Chubarov managed to concentrate on the painstaking creation of non-figurative painting primarily as a thing, an object in different dimensions, from the ornamental to the psychological. Chubarov considered himself a heir of the Russian “archaic” culture, drawing a parallel between his technique and the ideas of Malevich's “Black Square”. Working in his unique style, along with the iconic representatives of the Soviet art – Ilya Kabakov, Andrey Monastyrsky and Erik Bulatov, Chubarov embodied in his paintings the idea of a new era’s philosophy, visually identifying energy of the world around him, and transforming abstract symbols into images of reflection displaced in the conceptual art energy.

1990s
Chubarov's main task in painting starting from the early 1990s became a transition to abstract painting at several levels, deprived of “dark passion,” on the contrary that painting is optimistic compared with the works of the Soviet period. Previous experience in painting anarchic corporality during the 1970s and 1980s, allowed Chubarov to abandon self-revealing symbols. The artist refused close contact with the canvas, which is characteristic of abstract expressionism and which transforms into the fixation on a gesture, as in Pollock’s works, or into speculative space of pure color, as in Rothko’s paintings. Chubarov created paintings both to be seen closely and from a distance.

Chubarov and his wife came back to Moscow in the end of the 90s. They settled in apartment in Mytishchi visited by many key figures in nonconformist and official culture (including Ernst Neizvestny, Ilya Kabakov and Victor Popkov).

Chubarov's monumental works were exhibited at the famous venues in Europe and the USA, and later in Russia. At group exhibitions Chubarov's works were exhibited together the paintings of classic artists of the twentieth century – Mel Bochner, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Damien Hirst, Peter Halley and Stephan Balkenhol. A series of multi-figure compositions was included in the permanent exhibition of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Achievements
Award winner of Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

On the 22 of June] [[2007 the auction house Phillips De Pury & Co sold a 1994 «No title» picture for $1,380,000 - the record amount for alive Russian artist.

Quotes
"«Immerse yourself within your Self, and then you'll understand what a personal way of life is, as well as the burden of time; the severity of our dubious era will leave you, and help you free your body and soul. Become artists in the most simple and natural way»"

- Evgeny Chubarov

"«Art, lying on the surface, can be wrong»"

- Evgeny Chubarov

"«Chubarov in his work predicted the rebirth familiar gesture of abstraction in new intellectual form, with its own characteristic alphabet, language and drama, where the image and concept of his incarnation become one»"

- Gary Tatintsian about Evgeny Chubarov

"«His abstract compositions - a border state, duality, a return to the roots of the form, the conflict and harmony, male and female. This is the theme of death and birth, interweaving image of human flesh with objects of unknown inner space opening look at the new laws»"

- Gary Tatintsian about Evgeny Chubarov

"«At its limit, in his last compositions, the sensations it is impossible to overcome the boundaries of art Yevgeny Chubarov turns body to sign, to defective hieroglyph . Rewriting the historical reality, consistently denying Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Austrian actionism and German 'new wild', the artist opens a special page in the history of culture, where the sign becomes a sensual flesh, and the emotion is stored in digital instrumentality»"

- Vitaly Patsyukov about Evgeny Chubarov

"«The 20th century began with Cézanne, with his phrase, that everything can be reduced to the sphere, cylinder and cone, like the genetic code of the space ... My ribbon-like signs, sometimes resembling flags, sometimes sickle-shaped curve, mentioned by Malevich - and there sphere, cylinder and cone, but at a more complex level. They arise as a portion of energy as it forms ... They, I think, is built all the newest art»"

- Evgeny Chubarov (from the intervew to Vitaly Patsyukov)

"«You can see pure abstraction, where the image and the concept of abstraction become one»"

- Evgeny Chubarov (from the intervew to Vitaly Patsyukov)

Solo exhibitions

 * 2015  —  [[Gary Tatintsian Gallery], Moscow, Russia
 * 2014 — National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia. – To the 80th anniversary of the artist's exhibition
 * 2007  —  [[Gary Tatintsian Gallery], Moscow, Russia
 * 2007 — «The E. Chubarov». S'ART gallery, Moscow, Russia
 * 2004 — «Return to the Abstract». The State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg, Russia
 * 2004 — «Return to the Abstract»». National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia
 * 2003 — E. Chubarov. Gary tatintsian Gallery, New York, USA
 * 2001 — E. Chubarov. Gary tatintsian Gallery, New York, USA
 * 1998   —  «Victims of Stalinism». Park of ArtsMuseon, Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center 'Peace, Progress, Human Rights', Moscow, Russia
 * 1996  —  Andreas Weiss Galerie, Berlin, Germany
 * 1993  —  International Art Fair for East European Art. Hamburg, Germany
 * 1990  —  Galerie Vier, Berlin, Germany
 * 1989  —  Tatunz Galerie, Berlin, Germany
 * 1988  — « Homecoming ». The House of Sculpture, Moscow, USSR
 * 1987  — « «Toward the Scythians» ». Hermitage Association, Moscow, USSR

Selected group exhibitions
Dialogue: Russian and Modern Times. Boris Vian Center, France
 * 2009 — «Price Of Oil». Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
 * 2007 — «Create Your Own Museum». Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
 * 2003 — Kazimir Malevich's Birthday. Art Center DOM, Moscow
 * 2002 — Rejoinders. Art Center DOM, Moscow
 * 1999 — Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Eugene Chubarov. Tatunz Gallery, Berlin
 * 1998 — Galerie Bayer, Stuttgart
 * 1998   — «Victims of Stalinism». Park of ArtsMuseon, Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center 'Peace, Progress, Human Rights', Moscow, Russia
 * 1989 — Paradoxes Of The Corporeal. Municipal Gallery A-3, Moscow
 * 1988 — Picture As Object. The House of Artist on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow
 * 1987 — The Artist and Modern Times. Exhibition Hall in Kashirskoye Shosse, Moscow
 * 1986 — Holiday Culture. Eshibition Hall in Kashirskoye Shosse, Moscow
 * 1985 — The Mythology Of Environment. Exhibition Hall in Kashirskoye Shosse, Moscow
 * 1962 — Emerging Artists. The State A.S. Pushkin Art Museum, Moscow
 * 1961 — Emerging Artists. M.U.S.C.H. Moscow

Selected public collections

 * Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
 * The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
 * Rutgers University Museum, New Jersey, NY, USA
 * Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia

Literature

 * Dyakonov V. About Eugeny Chubarov.