Introduction of the artist:

Timur NOVIKOV(Russia)

Born in 1958, Leningrad, USSR. Died in 2002, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2011 Retrospective, Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre, Russia; 2008 Timur Novikov's Territory, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint-Petersburg; 1998 Retrospective. 1978-1998, The State Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg; 1993 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; 1993 Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; 1992 Center for Fine Arts, Miami
Florida; 1991 Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York; 1989 Timur Novikov and Afrika, Tate Liverpool;
Selected group exhibitions: 2012 Contemporary Russian Photography, FotoFest 2012 Biennial, Houston, USA; 2011 New Academy, Saint Petersburg and ArtFoundation Ekaterina, Moscow; 2010 Stroke with the Brush. New Painters. Necrorealists, The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; 2005 Russia! Guggenheim Museum, New York; 2004 Moscow-Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and The History Museum, Moscow; 2004 The Latest Acquisitions, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; 2001 Between Earth and Heaven, Museum of Modern Art, Ostend, Belgium.

Introduction of works:

The Drawings On The Rice Paper, chinese painting, 49×49 cm, 2002

The Drawings on the Rice Paper, video, 2002

Timur Novikov (d. 2002) is best known for his work with fabric whereby he developed a style, at first charming in its formal simplicity with instantly recognisable (almost childlike) motifs, that culminated in manifestations of Neo-Academicism, a movement he led in St Petersburg during the 1990s, that insisted on a return to classical ideals of beauty. Photographs – often of cultural heroes - became incorporated into his appliqué “collages” increasingly luxurious and thus more satisfying to the touch which is especially poignant as during his last years Novikov was blind.

Novikov’s interest in art from the Far East, corresponding to the aestheticism he espoused, is clearly evident in his Euro-China series. Made in 2002, it comprises thirteen pieces combining embroidered thread and beads and (western) old-master reproductions on tasselled satin, in a cut-and-paste postmodernist gesture. They are beautiful, but more affecting are Novikov’s seven Pictures on Rice Paper (2002), made with Chinese ink. There is a video that documents their production, in which we see the artist sightless, carefully feeling his way around the paper with the assistance of his old friend and fellow artist Sergei Bugayev (Afrika). The pictures are extraordinary, telling in their unpretentiousness as they mark a return to the minimalism of Novikov’s earlier work. We see trees and houses and boats against a mountainous horizon, characteristic of Chinese landscape, as opposed to the straight line where sky met the flat expanses he experienced as a child. This is an artist at the end of his life - and still at the height of his imaginative powers.