Evgeny Chubarov
Evgeny Chubarov (1934, Nizhnee Bobino, Bashkortostan, USSR — 2012, Mytishchi, Moscow region, Russia).
A painter, sculptor and one of the most enigmatic visual artists of his day, Evgeny Chubarov translated his emotions, moods and insights into a new and unprecedented visual language. This inspiration led him to create a visual iconography that exemplified the contemporary world and spiritual artistic traditions.
Greatly inspired by Byzantine, Russian, Armenian, Islamic and Arabic art – the art of illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy and architecture – Chubarov surrounded himself with illustrations from those masterpieces when he was working in his studio in Berlin. His true calling as an artist was to be the Medium that brought these disparate worlds together as an integral whole.
For more than four decades of his career, Chubarov studied the phenomenon of Pure Abstraction – abstract gestural painting in a new intellectual form where the line and its implementation took on special meaning in his hands.
The technique of applying paint with a squeegee is observed both in his black-and-white and color paintings. Colorful shapes in red, green, yellow, black, or white paint are applied to a lower thin layers of black brushstrokes, in such a way that they resemble handkerchiefs waving in the wind, although that is not what is depicted.
There is no traditional center in his paintings. The composition is randomly scattered across the canvas. Created in defiance of academic canons, this arbitrary composition eliminates the internal balance of colors, shapes and strokes and represent “non-relational art.” Nothing is weighed in this limitless freedom. This is where Chubarov performs masterfully.
Chubarov was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant during the 1980s and participated in exhibitions beside the leading artists of the postwar generation: Frank Stella, Peter Halley, Sol LeWitt and Damien Hirst.
The artist’s legacy includes several hundred paintings, thousands of works on paper and sculptures that can be found in Public Funds, museums and private collections around the world.
The Chubarov Foundation has been established to collect, preserve and promote the art of Evgeny Chubarov.
The main goals of the Foundation are to collaborate with art institutions on exhibiting, publishing and cataloguing the artist’s works in museums and private collections.