Artists

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		SALNIKOV Vladimir

Biographical information: 1948 - born in Chita, USSR
1959-1961 - Children’s Art School of Sverdlovsk’s Art College, Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), USSR
1971 - graduated from Moscow Institute of Printing Art, Graphic Department
1971-88 - Worked as book illustrator for various Moscow publishers
1972-82 - Lecturer at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute
1980 - Member of the USSR Artists’ Union
Live in Moscow
Collections where works are held: State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow, Russia
Novosibirsk Museum of Fine Arts, Novosibirsk, Russia
Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts, Nizhny Tagil, Sverdlovsk reg., Russia
Orel Regional Museum of Fine Art Orel, Russia
Stavropol Regional Museum of Fine Art, Stavropol, Russia
Tomsk Museum of Fine Arts, Tomsk, Russia
Museum of Nations Friendship, Tbilisi, Georgia
Museum of Art of the 20th Century, Lodz, Poland
Museum of the Czech literature, Prague, Czechia
Grand Duce of Luxembourg Collection
Owned by E. Peshler, Switzerland
Participation in exhibitions and auctions: SOLO EXIBITIONS:

2006 - "XX Century in Photographies", Paperworks Gallery, Moscow
2005 - "10 000 Left Women`s Ears", Russian Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
2004 - "Studys by Lenin", NCCA, Moscow
2002 - "Stocktakong of History", in cooperation with Nina Kotel, Local-History Museum, Toliatti, Russia
2002 - "Vladimir Salnikov", Krokin Gallery, Moscow
2001 - "Premapping of Desire", "Art Media Centre", TV Gallery, Moscow
2001 - "Concerning of history. Travel is Style of Life", in cooperation with Nina Kotel,
The second Moscow International Festival "Fation and Style in Photo", "Union" Gallery, Moscow

GROUP EXIBITIONS:

2006 - "Gazeta" ("Newspaper"), Kovcheg gallery, Moscow
2005 - "I’m from MilitaryMan’s Family", in cooperation with Nina Kotel, "Artist and Arms", M’Ars Center, Moscow
2004 - ArtKlyazma Festival, Moscow
2004 - "Lifshits for Beginners", Sam Brook Gallery, Moscow
2004 - "Love, Eroticism, Sex", Galereya na Solyanke, Moscow
2004 - "Super Woman", Fine Art Gallery, Moscow
2004 - "Landscape", Fine Art Gallery, Moscow
2003 - ArtKlyazma Festival, Moscow
2003 - "First Axiom", S.Art Gallery, Moscow
2002 - "On a Sunny Beach in June", Kovcheg gallery, Moscow
2001 - "Nizhniy Tagil’s Hyku", in cooperation with Nina Kotel, Museum of Fine Arts, Nizhniy Tagil, Russia
2001 - "Internet’s Angel", Media Forum, Museum of Non-Conformist’s Art, St. Petersburg
2001 - "Iskusstvo", New Art from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev”, Kunstverain of Rosenhiem, Rosenheim Germany
Autobiographical notes: Actually, what am I doing in art?
Keep moving somewhere, under the pressure of escaping and totally uncontrollable forces of curiosity and unwillingness to fit in some ordinary frame. God forbid! I wouldn’t like to mimicrize imperceptibly for myself, so I keep my eyes glued on my own silhouette – how does it look against a common background? Of course, it entails some problems, though non-fatal so far. But then I am not rotting alive – it would certainly happen once I started more strictly following all those rules and bans that define a modern Moscow artist’s configuration. And I can afford myself to make up geopolitical theories, present TV sermons (in accordance with a dogma of my own called "Salvation of Spaces") and at the same time paint portraits and the nude symbolizing the Beautiful, the basis of the whole Soviet regime. Not to be or to become an abstract person, who could be easily calculated, predicted, manipulated, encoded – this is what art means for me. To avoid all this in order to remain infantile, capricious, voluntaristic and schizoid, to behave as a prima donna, i.e. to have a right to be regressive – this is art for me. It’s quite another matter how to gain this – this is philosophy. To be in art means to be in mother’s womb.
What the critics say: I could hardly name any of the nowadays artists who would be involved in the art of portrait in the way Vladimir Salnikov is. We are used to what traditional paintings have taught us, i.e. that a portrait is a kind of an instant print, picturesque face copy, even if the traces of time accumulate in the final momentary image as a result of numerous seances during which a desirable face was eventually showing up. However, for Vladimir Salnikov the portrait is first of all a sort of genre task, every time building its genre frame along with the image being created. But it does not mean that everything should be balanced and put together to get a comfortable composition to watch (though the artist has to think of this as well); the matter is that every time the possibilities of the genre itself are to be mastered parallel to the image showing up. And if that’s the case, then "realism" or "accuracy" of these works does not mean pure resemblance (the artist will always please us with this as well), but it means to what extent this resemblance fits in this specific genre. In other words, this resemblance will depend on the work composition required by a definite object, on used or invented technique and, in the end, on impossibility to predict what will come out of such "application". The genre will come to existence, more proper, will develop along with each separate work. And I have to say once again that this is the genre of the portrait.

When I speak about Vladimir Salnikov’s portraits, I mean not only the portraits themselves (by the way, mostly women’s portraits) but paintings in general, formally not implicated in the portrait genre. Huge canvases depicting various parts of a woman’s body – surprising, how their massiveness has been muffled by the material ephemerality (the point is the smoke-colored cover over the number of canvases) – these canvases present those very portraits. Even hieroglyphic compositions consisting of a number of symbols colored at random are still a sort of portrait. This portrait has been divide d in numerous components that seemingly have nothing to do with the face being depicted; however, the image is based on them. It can be said that this is a portrait of the elements being depicted.

The question is – what does the genre of the portrait mean? I suppose, in the very structure of the portrait genre there has been defined some face, its main characteristics. Even if the face itself is not there, this is an initial scheme (along with our body) according to which we locate ourselves and move in the world, a kind of marked screen accepting all our projections and returning them to us. Vladimir Salnikov seems to keep asking himself the following questions: How do our meetings with the world happen? How do we meet and recognize each other? How do we happen to know all things? How do we master the landscape? He is asking himself, addressing those invisible and hard structures underlying our life. Vladimir Salnikov is studying the portrait as the way we have built ourselves and at the same time – which had been built for us. As if every time the artist performs all things we have to do through habit: he does not trust all those things that our consciousness transfers to the field of physical automatism obeying to the savings law. He tries to master man’s way in the world in his each work, as well as the scheme that helps to organize this way, having made it an object of presentation, including the one of paintings. Vladimir Salnikov seems to keep to the two poles at the same time, i.e. to what has been performed, and the performance mechanism itself – what is developing along with possible identifications but so far is free of them.

I think it is quite natural that, studying the portrait as an element come-to-be, setting free its elementary foundations, the artist is presenting us his own image, showing it as a preaching face. This close-up face living in time, involved in mimic plays – of course it is unique and at the same time is an ordinary face. Again bifurcation problem is there – the face as a scheme and as an imperceptible excess of something alive. A portrait in paintings as if balancing on this verge – Vladimir Salnikov just reminds us how a portrait becomes the portrait.

E. Petrovskaya
Bibliography

* - This information has been provided by the Soros Center for Contemporary

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