Oleg Pishchev

Oleg Pishchev graduated from the art college in Shymkent in 1978, and from the arts and graphics department of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (now Moscow Pedagogical State University) in 1983. After graduating, he turned down offers to work in Moscow and returned to Shymkent, where he taught at the school of the arts. Due to his insistence on his freedom and disagreements regarding key pedagogical issues, he was forced to resign. For some time, he taught at the arts and graphics departments of the Shymkent Pedagogical Institute (now the South Kazakhstan University), which he also left.

In 1986, Pishchev was awarded the second-place prize at the international sculpture competition in Shymkent. His prize was a large attic studio where he could make art. He also used the studio as an intellectual salon, frequented by artists, musicians, actors, writers, and other representatives of the Shymkent intelligentsia.

Despite his popularity in his hometown, Pishchev moved to Alma-Ata in 1987. In Alma-Ata, he taught art classes for young cancer patients, and later decorated, for free, the walls of the hospital. The city government recognized his efforts and designated a basement studio for his use. Here, as in Shymkent, he organized a salon, which for a long time drew a creative crowd. The paintings made in that  studio are similar in spirit to the work of the Alma-Ata underground group Zelenyi treugolnik (Green Triangle), which Pishchev joined in 1987. The influence of this rebellious collective on Pishchev’s work is evident in his paintings from this period—Castration of the Boar (1987, ZAM, 2000.0736), Drama (1987, ZAM, 2000.0737), and Repentance (1988, ZAM, 2000.0731). The spirit of resistance to censorship and the Soviet system and its suppression of free thought is felt in all these works. They were exhibited at a seminal exhibition of contemporary art by nonconformist artists in Kazakhstan, Перекресток [Crossroads], in 1989. Participation in the exhibition launched all of its participants, including Pishchev, to fame.

These three works were noticed and purchased by Jane Sharp, curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum, in an anniversary exhibition of the Green Triangle group at Ular gallery in 2000, after which they made their way into the Zimmerli Museum’s collection.

Pishchev worked in a variety of media—he painted, drew, created sculptures from various materials, and made ceramics. He was also constantly teaching. He created his own teaching studio and worked with children and adults. In the process of this work, he concluded that drawing lessons were particularly useful for the ill, and he began to study art therapy. In 1997, he founded the Art Therapy Center in Almaty, where he worked with patients suffering from asthma and allergies, as well as depression and other psychological issues. In 1998, he graduated from the psychology department of M. Lomonosov Moscow State University.

According to the artist, around this time he had a dream in which he saw a gallery of paintings he had not yet made, which, in his words, symbolized the return of lost values and demonstrated a return to the achievements of Renaissance art, the aesthetics of impressionism and modernism, and the philosophies of Southeast Asia. This revelation, together with his resentment at a lack of recognition in artistic circles, gave rise to a new direction in Pishchev’s work. He began to conduct an ongoing dialogue with the artists of the past, drawing on their methods. His Moscow academic art training allowed Pishchev to paint realistic images of the surrounding world, including people. And his deep knowledge of art history allowed him to style them in allusions to historical schools. Such stylistic inclinations, however, led the once-nonconformist artist to make work in a pseudo-mannerist style.  

The subjects in his images seem to have come from the canvases of the Italian and Northern Renaissance painters—women with elaborate hairstyles, gentlemen in medieval costumes. Their poses are mannered, their clothing overly decorative. Pishchev often splits the picture plane into several zones, as though separating the subjects’ earthly being and their thoughts and memories. The triptych Time Travel (1999–2000), Dialogue (2001), and many other works all possess a certain dualism: virtuoso technique along with the absence of a clear artistic idea. In this period, Pishchev often combined quotations from different historical styles. In Dialogue, a portrait of a woman in profile in the Renaissance style combines a dialogue between two ladies, depicted in a style similar to suprematism, with a background and a hairstyle in the ornamental style of art nouveau. Elsewhere, in the series Возвращение ценностей [The Return of Values] (2004, artist’s estate), musicians painted in the style of the late Renaissance perform against a background of ornamental fragments borrowed from Gustav Klimt. Also characteristic is the use of direct quotations from Klimt, like the woman embracing a horse in a pose reminiscent of a mother and child in the painting the Золотой век Модерна [The Golden Age of Art Nouveau] (2001, artist’s estate). 

Pishchev often uses familiar images from popular artists—in various paintings, viewers will encounter Henri Matisse’s fish, Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers, Klimt’s patterns, and abstractions in the styles of Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others. This method of drawing on the authority of recognized masters helped Pishchev to become commercially successful, appealing to the general public by providing “the joy of recognition.” Art historians have rarely written about him, excerpt a few who have embraced his new eclectic turn: “Oleg Pishchev’s images are the images of a bygone time. The real, what’s happening now, connected to with quick-moving life, attracts him only as far as it can help guide him toward a theme, but that theme is drawn from the darkness of the past. No matter what this quite gifted, languorous, sophisticated, and stylish artist depicts—harem women, mortal women abducted by the gods, characters from the Renaissance or the Silver Age—all of this is material from days long past, and shows only that the artist’s eyes (attentive and penetrating as they are) have rotated 180 degrees, and are currently located on the back of his head.” [1]

Yulia Sorokina

Translated from Russian by Elina Alter

Notes:

1. A. Sinenkii, Oleg Pishchev: Catalogue. (Almaty: Oleg Pishchev Studio, 2001).