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Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks (Themes and Variations)

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"Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks (Themes and Variations)" is the publication which complements the first major exhibition in Russia of works by Oleg Vassiliev (marking the artist's return to his homeland for the first time since emigrating in 1990). The exhibition took place in Moscow in October, 2004 at the State Tretyakov Gallery and will travel in February 2005 to the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. This catalogue and the show is important both to the art world and to the Russian art scene, as it will re-introduce Oleg Vassiliev's works in their entire scope to art collectors and admirers, as well as to a new generation of Russians who grew up in the post-perestroika era.

Oleg Vassiliev was born in 1931 in Moscow and now lives and works in New York. From 1947 to 1952, he studied at art school, and in 1958 he graduated from the V.I. Surikov State Art Institute, Moscow, where he specialized in graphic art. From the 1950s to the 1980s Oleg Vassiliev, together with Eric Bulatov, illustrated children's books as a team for thirty-three years. Time not spent on book illustrating - approximately six months a year - was devoted to creative work for themselves. In the 1960s, Vassiliev investigated painting itself as an instrument to explore its space, its relationship to surface and border, the energy flow in the picture, and the transformation of subject and space, using Favorsky's system as the basis, as well as the interactions of the surface-space in the canvas. Vassiliev's principal themes, which were born while he was in Russia and continue to the present day, are his memories of home and houses, roads, forests, fields, friends and family.

"Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks (Themes and Variations)" is a journey of intellectual and creative exploration of the artist's career from 1949 to the present day. "Memory Speaks" in the title is an allusion to Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"; literary references are important for understanding Vassiliev's work and psyche.