THE TSUKANOV ART COLLECTION

 
 

Vechtomov Nikolay

  ‘We live in the dark and have already adjusted to it, we can fully differentiate between objects. And yet we draw light from it, from the radiance of the space at sunset, it somehow gives us the energy to see. Therefore, for me objects are not important, rather their reflection because in them lurks the breathing of an alien element …’

1923 - 2007

Nikolay Evgenevich Vechtomov began his artistic journey, like many artists of that time, with abstract expressionism but he quickly found his own, mystical and surreal style. At the end of the 1950’s a cosmic consciousness began to shine through his works: the universal real and geometric forms would occupy a conditional-endless space. It is difficult to classify the artist’s work in terms of a traditional genre. They are rather symbolic-allegorical compositions based on factitious, highly abstracted forms and tense, often tragic and uneasy contrasting combinations of colour. In the middle of the 1950’s Vechtomov, together with his fellow students, Vladimir Nemukhin and Lidiya Masterskaya, joined the Lianozovo group of ‘unofficial art’. 

 

‘Nikolay Vechtomov is probably the only one who does not rank amongst the surrealists for nothing. ….His canvases are windows opening out onto an unfamiliar world. This is not a transcendental world, it is not even a world of dreams or subconscious. It is a world of space. But not that space depicted by science fiction writers. Rather, it did not become this world because the means at the artist’s disposal were different. He is not a naturalist, reconstructing the scenery of an outer-space journey. He communicates a feeling, an environment of worlds which either exist or not and he makes them convincing. …These are half-abstract, as if cut out of heavy metal plates, flat around shapes on a background of stridently red or yellow skies, sometimes with a notional band of earth, undoubtedly creating a certain mood…’ L. Kropivnitski, 1965
 
The artist's work can be found in the following museums and collections:
   
Slill Life
Contemporary Art Museum
Space Motif
ArtAntic Gallery