“Who knows! Perhaps, painting will become his second vocation,” wrote the Leningrad youth newspaper “Smena” in 1966 about a 23 year-old geologist Yevgeniy Rukhin. Since this year, painting indeed had become Yevgeniy’s first and the only vocation which has now brought him world fame.
     Yevgeniy Rukhin’s entrance into the world of art was triumphal. Four personal art expositions took place in Leningrad within 1966 and 1967. It was the same 1966 year when his first personal exhibition of paintings was held abroad in the Betty Parsons Gallery in New-York. Later on during his life and after death numerous exhibitions and demonstrations of the artist’s works were organized both in our country and abroad, including those in the Leningrad Hermitage museum (1988, from Basmadzhan Collection), in the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery (1988), in the Jersey city Museum of Modern Russian Art, USA (1989, solo exhibition), in Washington and many other American cities.
     According to D. Davis, cited by “America” magazine, “Rukhin’s works are distinguished for the priority of form above the subject, which is so characteristic of the mid XX century art. His paintings are permeated with Russian mysticism and symbolism”. In mature works of Yevgeniy Rukhin the colour scheme is always unexpected and expressive; the paint is applied in a thick layer. The artist often used a mixed technique in order to achieve additional expressiveness, installing the most unusual combinations of objects, sometimes very different in texture.
     The Soviet government of that period was limiting all forms of artistic expression to the themes of socialist realism, forbidding abstract forms. An “unofficial” art movement appeared in the 1960’s under the leadership of sculptor Ernest Neizvestny and painters Mikhail Chemyakin, Yevgeniy Rukhin and Oskar Rabin. Their informal art exhibitions were held in parks and social clubs. The stiff situation of the 70s, which was the reason why in 1977 – 78 the leaders of the non-official movement left the country, put an end to the romantic period in the underground’s history. The Ministry of Internal Affairs became seriously interested in the artists, and the city’s administration worked out some subtle methods of struggle against nonconformism. The artists were being persecuted, the leader of the movement Yevgeniy Rukhin burnt in his studio under unknown circumstances in 1976.
     Today Yevgeniy Rukhin’s paintings for the most part could be found abroad: in 1960-70’s foreigners were almost the only buyers from his art studio. Very little of Rukhin’s art works remain in Russia - those presented by Yevgeniy to his friends and those, acquired by rare in those years collectors, among which was the famous Georgy Mikhailov. So now you can find several paintings of Rukhin in the Mikhailov Art Gallery in St. Petersburg. After the painter’s death his family emigrated to the USA and took away major part of his art heritage.

     Isachev Gallery: 82 Moika Emb., Tel: 312 5131
     Mikhailov Gallery: 53 Liteiny Pr., Tel: 272 6366, 272 4848.