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Oleg Tselkov is an artist of life metaphors. His trademark face masks and biomorphic plastics are his toolkit for the visual expression of ideas. He invented this language in the late 1950s and used it until the end of his life.

Six months of life in the new political and economic conditions. What has happened to the Russian art market during this time? How has it responded to change?

The porcelain black sculptures and their white counterparts are Oleg Tselkov's first and only experience of transferring his characters into small sculptural plastic. In other words: he had plates, vase, dishes and even a porcelain egg, but there the technique of transferring flat images was used. Tselkov had volumetric plasticity only in porcelain and bronze.

1971 — Steinberg's Moscow-Tarusian period. A light, airy, luminous piece. Figurative basis dominates in this work. Although if you look closely, the background on which the bird flies is dissected by a geometric element, typical of the artist's Suprematist line.

In 1977, Oleg Tselkov was going into exile with the status, if not of a living legend, then certainly of an underground celebrity. This “enfant terrible” was kicked out of the Union of Artists, worked on the decorations of provincial theatres for reference, and was deprived of exhibition opportunities. At the same time he was not a political dissident. Tselkov did not participate in the Bulldozer exhibition, shunned loud statements, did not adhere to any influential “circle” or “group”. But at the same time he drank with Yevtushenko and Siqueiros, was friends with Akhmadulina, sipped wine with Akhmatova and sold paintings to the diplomats of the Costakis circle. He lived as if the devil himself were not his brother.

One of the most famous innovators of the post-war generation was expelled several times from various art institutes. Living in the Soviet Union, Oleg Tselkov regularly had to go to subterfuges to be considered an artist and not a slacker. But for some reason, Evtushenko, Akhmatova, Siqueiros and Guttuso came to this untrustworthy subject to see paintings in his room on Sokol. His father, who worked at a secret plant, was then dragged to the KGB to take responsibility for his son's dubious acquaintances.

Works of the inventor of “panic realism” can be very different in their technical complexity. Some “quick” graphics works are done very succinctly, literally in a single pass. Technical stinginess is also characteristic of many paintings by Petr Belenok. But that is not the case today.

Leonid Talochkin was a collector, chronicler and legend of the underground art, whose name was associated with the very rooting of the term “the other art”. He was among the organizers of the eponymous exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1990, and before that he was among the organizers of the famous “Beekeeping” and “House of Culture” exhibitions at VDNKh (1975) and dozens of others. Talochkin is often called the archivist of “the second avant-garde”. An enthusiast in love with free art, he had a talent for being in the right place at the right time.

According to legend, the sudden appearance of the Suprematist cycle by the expressionist Zverev in the late 1950s occurred after he saw works by Olga Rozanova and Lyubov Popova in the apartment of George Costakis. Being greatly impressed by the Russian avant-garde, he created a series of geometric abstractions of his own. It was a very short and vivid experimental period, which began suddenly and ended suddenly. Since the end of the 1950s, Zverev never returned to this subject.

The exemplary Steinberg of the late 1970s. Even before France, before emigration, before the Claude Bernard Gallery. This is the Moscow-Tarusian Steinberg. And this is the high point of his explorations into the depths of suprematist abstraction.