Valery Vatenin

Valery Vladimirovich Vatenin (Вале́рий Влади́мирович Вате́нин; January 27, 1933 – June 16, 1977) was a Russian Soviet realist painter, graphic artist, and art teacher, who lived and worked in Leningrad. He was a member of the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of Russian Federation, and regarded as one of the brightest representatives of the "left wing" of the Leningrad school of painting.

Biography
Valery Vladimirovich Vatenin was born on 27 January 1933 in Leningrad.

In 1947, Vatenin entered at Tavricheskaya Art School, which he has graduated in 1952. In 1953, he was accepted at the first course of Department of Painting at the Repin Institute of Arts, where he studied under, among others, Valery Pimenov, Leonid Khudiakov, and Alexander Zaytsev.

In 1959, he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Boris Ioganson studio, together with German Yegoshin, Alexandra Tokareva, Nikolai Furmankov, Boris Nikolaev, Valentina Rakhina, and other young artists. His graduation work was genre painting "On the Balcony"

Beginning in 1959, Vatenin participated in art exhibitions. He painted portraits, genre paintings, still lifes, worked in easel and monumental painting, as graphic artists and art teacher. His work was exhibited posthumously in his native Leningrad in 1985, and in Moscow in 1990.

In his paintings reality coexists with fiction. Portrait, landscape, still life shall lose canonical genre boundaries and appear as reflections the life in its complex spatial and temporal metamorphosis.

Vatenin was a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists since 1965. From 1965–73, he taught painting and drawing at the Department of General Painting of the Vera Mukhina Institute.

Vatenin died on 16 June 1977 in Leningrad as a result of a road accident. His paintings reside in State Russian Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, in the Art museums and private collections in Russia, England, Japan, USA, and other countries.