About

OK signing book

Born 1932 in Moscow the artist studied in an art studio for youth from 1942 to 1947 and in Moscow at the Grabar Art School for Children from 1949 to 1951.

Having spent 3 years on the artist animator course at the Union Cartoon Studio (Souzmultfilm), Oleg Kudryashov joined the Moscow Organisation of Artists Union in 1961. He was well known in avant-garde art circles but almost never exhibited together with other artists.

Oleg Kudryashov
ok-and-Roland-Penrose

He emigrated in 1974, burning thousands of his works which he was not allowed to take. The artist lived in London, where he was visited by G. Kostakis who praised the artist’s work, placing him above many of his contemporaries.

Oleg Kudryashov has lived in Russia since 1997. The artist creates paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, linocuts and etchings using dry point on zinc and plastic, also large energetic monochromes (before 1980) and abstract colour compositions.

ok 1987 CONSTRUCTION MAKING
ok 1982 - 1

His artwork has only one impression. The next one is never the same, as he would always add something to the original drawing. The artist also created three-dimensional compositions made out of his two-dimensional works. Some of his 3D works have been realised as very large colourful metal sculptures.
The artist quietly passed away at his home in September 2022.

Gallery

Artworks

1981 p1-1 105 x 71.5 sm
1991 p2129 150 x 120.5
1995 p2335 2-4 154 x 107 sm
1995 p2353 1-3 145 x 106 sm
1995 p2359 3-45 141.5 x 107 sm
1999 3D p2475 109 x 73 x 24 sm
2358-3-45
Kudryashov_Sculpture
1995 p2356 1-1 124 x 107 sm
2388s
1991-2157-a-p-107-x-136,-89,5-x-120
1995-p2333-5-6-139-x-108,-128-x-90
1995-p2361-p-a-60-x-70,-39-x-49.5
1995-p2367-1-45-76-x-107,-60-x-91
1995-p2370-p-a-107.5-x-76,-89.5-x-60
2365-bat-1-a
triptych-2366-3-3-r-6
Load more
Price Enquiry

Experts Choice

Oleg Kudryashov

Edward Lucie-Smith
English art historian, art critic and art curator

Some of Kudryashov’s most typical figurative compositions show landscapes, often urban ones, seen as if from window, somewhere high up. These segue easily into compositions that are, in appearance at least, entirely abstract, via others, where there are faint remnants of figuration – that is, if you are sufficiently clued in to look for them. These seem typical of his contemplative, slightly distanced and detached attitudes towards what he sees in the world as it confronts him.

Read more

The Kudryashov Phenomenon

Igor Golomstock
Art Historian

Kudryashov’s work is technically extremely various. He moves from elegant miniatures to large-scale graphic triptychs and polyptychs, from drypoint etchings to paper reliefs, from these to metal structures and from grotesque figurative work to abstraction. But, unlike the Russian Constructivists, his abstract work is not an experiment with form and neither is it a projection of subconscious impulses, as with Jackson Pollock and Tachisme. It is the crystallisation of his visual representation of our real surroundings, that is to say reality in a condensed and concentrated form.

Read more

Drawing in Space

Christina Lodder
Honorary professor of history of art, University of Kent
President of the Malevich Society in New York

Oleg Kudryashov was born and grew up in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. He witnessed the hardships and deprivations of the Second World War and began training as an artist at ten years old in 1942 in a country where art was synonymous with Socialist Realism. Yet as he came to maturity, in the 1960s and 1970s, he broke away from the aesthetic norms that had been imposed on Russian art since the 1930s and began to pursue his own ideas. He did not join the dissident movement or become a recognised ‘unofficial artist’, but his uncompromisingly independent spirit, artistic integrity, and innovative talent won the respect of all those who did.

Read more

A New Dimension

Roland Penrose
CBE Painter, photographer, poet
Co-founder of the ICA and major collector of modern art

The problem of transferring the vision of what we see to a two-dimensional surface has troubled the artist ever since he felt his way around the rugged walls of a dimly lit cavern. Even then the sensibility of primitive man induced him to use the accidental hollows, protrusions, asperities or smoothness of the rock to help him to give relief to images of the prey he needed to capture and also of himself as a hunter enhanced by magic powers.

Read more

Expressionist talent

William Packer
Financial Times

Oleg Kudryashov is first of all an expressionist by temperament and then a constructivist, which qualities place him directly in the great tradition of the radical Russian avant-garde of the early decades of the century. He works principally in drypoint on large metal sheets, which he attacks with direct and fierce energy. To classify him narrowly as a printmaker, however, would be quite wrong. He never editions his plates, and even a repeated proof is reworked on the paper to make it unique.

Read more

Extracts from Notes and Reminiscences

Oleg Kudryashov

Our communal house, occupied by a variety of colourful characters, stood in the grounds of an old engineering works. The whole yard was littered with heaps of iron, racks from gas generators, cylinders, pipes and huge rusting concrete-mixers that were manufactured by the works. The ground was covered with a thick layer of iridescent steel shavings swimming in pools of machine oil. This was our playground, where we played hide-and-seek among the pipes under the noses of the welders, who got on with their work as though we were not there.

Read more

City landscape and its inspiration

Marina Vaizey
The Sunday Times
30 January 1983

‘The Moscovite Oleg Kudryashov (b. 1932) left Russia in 1973 and now lives in Brixton. He is a major artist, who works with a method inimitably his own: drypoint, working directly On industrial zinc plate with his needle, drawing with great speed, printing only one impression, himself, from the plate ( although the plate may be reworked to make another evolving composition), often on paper already drenched with colour. The result – work of the past three years – form an exhilarating display at Riverside studios, Hammersmith.

Read more
Load more

Book

Oleg Kudryashov Bridge to the Future Cover

Exhibitions

Age of Graphics.
From Kazimir Malevich to Oleg Kudryashov
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Oleg Kudryashov: Bridge to the Future
Russian Cultural Centre, London, United Kingdom

New Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings in 2009–2014
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

Oleg Kudryashov: Retrospective, Woland Associazione Culturale, Magazzino delle Idee
Municipal Art Gallery, Trieste, Italy

Oleg Kudryashov: Freedom Inside Yourself, Retrospective exhibition to celebrate the artist’s 80th birthday
London Collectors Club, Bermondsey Project Space, London, UK

Oleg Kudryashov: the Touch of Life
New Jerusalem Art Museum, Istra, Russia

Relief and Around It
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

Kentridge and Kudryashov: Against the Grain
Kreeger Museum, Washington, D.C., USA

Intuition
Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Russia

Regional Art Museum
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Sakhalin Oblast, Russia

Art of Etching
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

7th Baltic States Biennial of Graphic Arts Kaliningrad – Koenigsberg
Kaliningrad Art Gallery, Kaliningrad, Russia

Awarded, Russian Federation National Award (State Prize) in Art (the year 2000)
LeVall Art Gallery, Novosibirsk, Russia

Oleg Kudryashov: Retrospective
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Homecoming
State Centre of Contemporary Art in Sakharov Museum, Moscow, Russia

2nd International Triennial of Graphic Arts
Prague, Czech Republic

Oleg Kudryashov: Constructions, Drypoints and Paper Sculptures
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

Contemporary Print Show Concourse Gallery
Barbican Centre, London, UK

Workshop 107
Wiltshire, UK

Contemporary Print Show
Concourse Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, UK

Workshop 107
Wiltshire, UK

Contemporary Print Show
Concourse Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, UK

Four Sculptures
The Economist, London, UK

Late 20th Century Prints
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, USA

Oleg Kudryashov
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia

Galerie Saint-Guillaume
Tokyo, Japan

Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery
London, UK (also in 1993, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002)

Works on Paper and Prints
Marlborough Graphics Gallery, London, UK

Personal Show
The Central House of Artists Moscow, Russia

The Unique Print 70’s into 90’s
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA

TRANSIT: Russian Artists between East and West
Long Island Museum of Fine Arts, Long Island, New York, USA

State Russian Museum
Leningrad, Russia

Roger Ramsay Gallery
Chicago, USA

Art Connection
Basel, Switzerland

Douglas Hyde Gallery
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

St Paul’s Gallery
Leeds, UK

Marlene Eleini Gallery
London, UK

European Triennial of Engraving (Triennale Europea dell’Incisione)
Grado, Italy

Galerie Patrick Cramer
Geneva, Switzerland (also in 1988, 1989, 1991)

Albert Totah Gallery
New York, USA

Peter Moores Project 8: Out of Line
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

The 2nd Contemporary Art Fair by Contemporary Art Society
London, UK

Landscape Interior, Coracle Press
London, UK

Double Elephant
Barbican Centre, London, UK

Brand New Prints
Martina Hamilton Gallery New York, USA

Coracle Press Gallery
London, UK

One of a Kind
AIR gallery, London, UK

Contemporary Art Society Market
London, UK

Public Collections

Arts Council of England

London, England

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Sydney, Australia

Ashmolean Museum

Oxford, England

Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Boymans-van Beuningen Museum

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Collection of the City New-Ulm

New Ulm, Minnesota, USA

Contemporary Art Society

London, England

Fitzwilliam Museum

Cambridge, England

Grafische Sammlung

Schaetzler Palais, Augsburg, Germany

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute

Washington DC, USA

Hunterian Museum

Glasgow, Scotland

Kreeger Museum

Washington DC, USA

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Los Angeles, California, USA

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Minnesota, USA

Yale Center for British Art

New Haven, USA

Museum of Fine Arts

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Nasher Museum of Art

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

National Gallery of Art

Dresden, Germany

National Gallery of Art

Washington DC, USA

New Jerusalem Art Museum

Istra, Russia

Norwich Castle Museum

Norwich, England

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Moscow, Russia

Saint Louis Art Museum

Missouri, USA

State Library of Saltykov-Schedrin

St. Petersburg, Russia

State Museum of Literature

Moscow, Russia

Tate Gallery

London, England

Tretyakoy Gallery

Moscow, Russia

Trinity College

Dublin, Ireland

Victoria and Albert Museum

London, England

Wakefield Art Gallery

Wakefield, England

Contact

    Send