Leonid Tishkov

Leonid Tishkov is an artist working in a wide range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. He has developed most of his projects for many years and across several different media. Born into a family of teachers in the small industrial town of Nizhniye Sergi, in Russia’s Ural mountains, Tishkov received no formal training in visual art. As he recalls in his memoir, from an early age he dreamed of becoming an artist, yet his parents disapproved of this career choice. [1] Instead he went to Moscow to be trained as a doctor at the A. I. Sechenov Medical Institute (now the Sechenov 1st Moscow State Medical University). While a medical student, he tried his hand at caricature and soon began publishing his cartoons in magazines as well as illustrating books for Soviet publishing houses. After graduation, he chose not to begin a career in medicine and earned a living as a cartoonist and book illustrator. In 1976, he became a member of Gorkom grafikov (City Committee of Graphic Artists) in Moscow, thus obtaining the status of a professional artist, which protected him from the threat of persecution for “freeloading” (avoiding official employment), an offense under Soviet law.

Because he was a self-taught artist, his manner of drawing was far from the academic standards of the era. Noted for their quirky style, wild imagination, and black humor, his works won prizes at industry competitions. This all ended in the late 1970s, when he sent a caricature to an international contest in West Berlin and the state-controlled Soviet press stopped publishing his cartoons. In the 1980s, he got to know the artists from the Moscow Conceptualist circle. Although Tishkov did not belong to this tight-knit community, he found their approach to art close to his own, sharing with them a passion for albums, a genre of works on paper where stories unfold on multiple sheets that combine words and images. For Tishkov, it was an ideal medium that allowed him to develop his absurd and complicated comics-style narratives. In the late 1980s, Tishkov started working at the famous artist squat at Furmanny Lane, a hub of unofficial artists who set up their studios there. The squat was frequented by foreign tourists and art enthusiasts, who arrived in Moscow in increasing numbers once the Soviet Union relaxed its border restrictions at the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika. When the authorities forced artists to leave the building at Furmanny, some of them, including Tishkov, moved their studios to another squat at Chistoprudny Boulevard.

In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, dragging along its publishing industry, Tishkov founded a one-person publishing house, called Dablus, and started publishing limited-edition artist books with his own free verse and drawings, as well as works by fellow artists. These books were reminiscent of medieval manuscripts or, to a certain extent, Russian lubok (traditional folk prints), as Tishkov preferred handwriting to conventional typeface and often hand-colored all of the illustrations in a print run. In his books and albums, he created a mythical universe of surreal imaginary creatures: what he called Dabloids, made up of a giant red foot with a tiny head, Vodolazes, deep sea divers who dwell underwater, Those Living in a Trunk, Stomachs, and Fathermother. The collapse of the Soviet empire and opening of borders provided new opportunities to artists from the former Soviet Union who became active in the global art scene. At the 1996 Biennale of Graphic Arts in Visby, Sweden, Tishkov created a room installation, The Dabloid House. Jan Aman, director of Stockholm’s contemporary art center Färgfabriken, who saw the installation, offered to produce a theater performance about Dabloids. The performance, which included elements of drama, opera, and ballet, took place in Stockholm in 1998. Tishkov wrote the script for the play and designed stage sets and costumes.

Many of Tishkov’s works are rooted in his childhood memories, family history, and early impressions of his hometown in the Urals. “For me, art is, first and foremost, a sublimation of poetry,” he once confessed in an interview. [2] Tishkov describes himself as a conceptual artist, yet, unlike the Moscow Conceptualists, text is an important but not essential part of his practice since a poetic vision can be expressed without words. Most of his projects started from text and image, yet beginning in the 1990s, he used other mediums as well. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked more and more with three-dimensional objects and installations. Often, his projects start from a series of drawings, as happened with Dabloids, and evolve to include installations, performances, and video.

Tishkov was among the pioneers of conceptual textile art in Russia, cocreating Vyazanik [Knitling] (2002) with his mother. This object is a full-body garment designed by the artist and knitted by Raisa Alexandrovna Tishkova from rags of clothes that belonged to her and the deceased members of the family. This technique is widely used in the Urals and other rural areas of Russia to recycle old clothes into knitted rugs. The wearable artwork, resembling a figure of some fairy-tale character, is accompanied by short texts describing each piece of a garment. The artist has found a physically convincing, tactile way to speak about memory, loss, and human connection.

One of his best-known projects, Private Moon, has no textual component at all. It started from a light object Tishkov created for the outdoor contemporary art festival Art Klyazma, in 2003, on the outskirts of Moscow. The artist put a fake moon on the tree and asked photographer Boris Bendikov to take a picture of it, for documentation purposes. Yet, upon looking at the photograph, Tishkov deemed it an artwork in its own right and decided to continue the project, photographing his shining moon sculpture in different unusual locations, from Moscow rooftops to Arctic glaciers. Soon he began creating installations with the moon for exhibitions and biennials worldwide. The project turned out to be so popular that, by the beginning of the 2020s, he kept different versions of the Private Moon installation in the United States, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand, to make logistics easier.

Tishkov has created many works of public art in different countries—some temporary installations      for festivals and art events, others permanent structures. Among the artworks still on view are Diver Light House (2009) (based on an idea of Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina’s from the 1930s) in Moscow’s Gorky Park; Cube of Space (2023), Private Sun (2022), and Private Moon (2003–ongoing) at Malevich Park near Moscow; and Floating Moon (2017) in the town of Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia.

Tishkov has had dozens of solo exhibitions in Russia, Ukraine, Sweden, Poland, Korea, the United States, and other countries. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York City, NY), Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, NC), Northwestern University Museum (Chicago, IL), Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland), State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia), and State Russian Museum (Saint Petersburg, Russia).

Tishkov is the author of two autobiographical books: the memoir How to Become a Genius Artist without Having a Drop of Talent (2007) and a fictionalized collection of childhood memories, with the artist’s own drawings, Look Homeward (2020). He often collaborates with publishers specializing in artist books who publish his drawings and albums as limited-edition prints, since he believes that art should be affordable not only to oligarchs but also to people with moderate incomes. Tishkov is married to writer and journalist Marina Moskvina and has illustrated many of her books with his photographs and drawings.

Ekaterina Wagner

Photo portrait: Leonid Tishkov, 2014. Photo by Raul Skrylev, Moscow. Published under Creative Commons license.

Notes:

1. Tishkov, Leonid. How to Become a Genius Artist without Having a Drop of Talent. (Moscow: OGI, 2013: 16–17.
2. Petrovichev, Aleksander. “Леонид Тишков: Ладомир; Объекты утопий” [Leonid Tishkov: Ladomir; Objects of utopia]. In Заведомый шедевр [Known masterpiece]. Ekaterinburg: TATLIN, 2015: 73.