Saatchi Gallery- Breaking the Ice Moscow Art 1960's/80's...(2012)

I recently came across this russian art exhibition at the saatchi gallery. Some really nice pieces were presented by a range of diverse russian artists. From sculpture installations to paintings, a wide use of different displays and medium was seen to be used throughout. One particularly artist i really liked was, one named Oleg Tselkov. He paints brightly coloured and contrasted portraits of mask looking faces that seem to fade out of each mask creating a trippy, illusional painting of pertruding features and crude abstract shapes. I love the colours Oleg uses within his paintings, his technique of fading the colours deeply and perfectly into one another, almost giving his artwork a smokey and misty effect. I really loved his 'Smoker' painting, depicting a figure on a bight yellow background smoking a pipe, the smoke from the pipe acts as a sort of black cloud over a hill of buildings behind the figure. The first and most obvious thing that caught my eye instantly with this piece was the alluring colours, from yellows to pinks and purples, black and fiery orange. Really nice combination of colours that seemed to compliment one another in the piece, his almost 'child like' style of drawing was really interesting as my recent lecture have been about the act of Drawing and understanding ways that artists draw through any influence. An example of this somewhat 'child like' interpretation of Oleg's portrait 'Smoker' is, the positioning of the pipe in the figures mouth, it is clear that the figure is smoking from it, but without the pipe being in the mouth it is merely placed by on top of the figures mouth as an indication of smoke and or someone smoking. Loved the composition of this piece also, the soft emerging shapes of the background images and the main figure.