Viewing Room | Evgeny Chubarov Untitled, 1992–1993

‘Immerse yourself within your Self, and then you'll understand what a personal way of life is. Free your body and soul. Become artist in the most simple and natural way.’ — Evgeny Chubarov

A painter, sculptor and enigmatic abstract artist, Evgeny Chubarov translated his emotions, moods and intellectual insights to a new unprecedented visual language. This inspiration led him in creating a visual iconography that thoroughly depicts both a contemporary world and the spiritual traditions of medieval art.

However, Chubarov's technique was far from Pollock's gestural abstraction or drip painting. His proficient mastery of all color spectrum, emphasized by the distinctive accents and powerful brushstrokes, brings his work into closer proximity to the confident expressionism by Joan Mitchell. The underlying verbalism and intuitive discipline of composition peculiar to Van Gogh's abstract painting elevate Chubarov's work from 'casual' abstraction to the level of intellectual expressionism.

The Artist The Medium

In his work, Evgeny Chubarov developed his own visual language. Toward the end of his career, he abandoned figurative images and retreated to his inner freedom tied in with his spirituality.

Greatly inspired by Byzantine, Russian, Armenian and Arabic art – the art of medieval icons, illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy and architecture – Chubarov always surrounded himself with illustrations of these masterpieces when working in his studio in Berlin. His true calling as an artist was being the medium that essentially brought these different worlds together as integral whole.

For more than four decades of his career Chubarov studied a phenomenon of the Pure Abstraction – an intellectual abstraction in a new form where the line and its implementation gained a special meaning.