Exhibition of Igor Vulokh "Remembering Igor Vulokh"

2018 - the anniversary year of the artist Igor Vulokh

Igor Alexandrovich Vulokh (January 3, 1938, Kazan - November 28, 2012, Moscow) is a nonconformist artist of the 60s, one of the classics of abstract and minimalism. Born in Kazan, graduated from Kazan Art College in 1958, then studied at the Art Faculty of VGIK. The creative formation of the artist took place in the late 50s-60s, when the “thaw” and “frosts” followed each other. It was during this period that the art parallel to the official one began to take shape - nonconformism. Igor Vulokh, by virtue of his extreme individualism, has always been aloof from various groups, his path is that of a loner. However, the master’s work became an organic part of the new international artistic movement that arose in the late 50s and early 60s.

In the 1960s, the young Igor Vulokh began to search for his creative path. In the beginning there was figurative expressive painting, mainly landscapes, dehumanized, filled with dead elements of once living nature. The metaphysical essence of the works of this period, their illusory nature speaks of the young author’s desire through the visible object world to express the invisible, felt sensually. Gradually, his searches went beyond the visible, empirical and led to pointless plastic. In 1968, I. Vulokh began a series of white minimalist works that he wrote all his life - “white Vulokh”.

The external impulses of Igor Vulokh’s works are simple, they are reflected in the names of the works - landscape, interior, still life, detail. But in his pictorial solutions there are no concrete images of the object world. The artist displays not objects as such, but a combination of sensations, emotional and sensory perceptions of the structure of the world in its continuous change. Vulokh’s paintings are mean rhythmic systems in which color or non-color (white) interact with texture, the plane of the canvas with relief, straight lines are parallel or intersect. In these abstract compositions, the artist often includes a very real phenomenon - the horizon line, or rather - its illusion. He achieves this by gradually thickening, and then completely merging the relief parallel lines or by successively reducing them to the disappearance of convex forms. Peering into the paintings of Igor Vulokh, we do not see the plane of the canvas, the artist leads us to the other side of the picture, to infinity. Graphics I. Vudokha saturated color. His compositions on paper from bright large spots, stripes, lines seem to carry a light source. They create the effect of multilayered, multidimensional, airy and often cause quite specific images, for example, changing seasons or days.

In 1961, Igor Vulokh met with the poet Gennady Aigi. They become friends for life, Igor created illustrations for Aigi’s poetry, and the poet dedicated a cycle of poems to him. More than 10 of their joint books have been published in Russia and abroad. Igor Vulokh also created a series of graphic works to the verses of the Swedish poet Tumas Transtremer (Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011), which became his favorite illustrations. An exhibition of these drawings was held at the Fine Art Gallery in 2001, and the poet himself was present. In 1988, in Denmark, Troels Andersen publishes the first monograph on Wooloch.

In 1996, the Fine Art Gallery and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation nominated I. Vulokh for the State Prize, and he became its nominee. Igor Vulokh’s works are mesmerizing, simple at first glance, they then evoke a complex range of experiences, thoughts, fantasies. Irina Filatova