VLADIMIR YANKILEVSKIY "HEROIC MONUMENT"

Retrospective of Vladimir Yankilevsky (1938–2018) - one of the main innovators of Soviet unofficial art, a participant in the notorious and iconic exhibition “30 years of Moscow Art Museum”, which was defeated by Khrushchev. The original direction of creativity, which was developed by Vladimir Yankilevsky, can be called epic expressionism. The cycle of compositions over which the artist began to work in the early 60s, united under the general name “Space of Experiences” and underlying the whole work of Yankilevsky, was an attempt to create an image of the game of world forces through human experience. Already in these years, a fundamental concept of his work was formed. This is a Man against the backdrop of Eternity. In the 1970s, another existential idea in the artist’s work was “existential boxes”, personifying the limited space of human existence - the contradiction between dreams and the restrictions imposed by the social environment. In January 2018, the artist died, a month before his 80th birthday.