Ablai Karpykov

In 1968, Ablai Karpykov graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI), and in 1975, he finished a graduate program in architecture in Alma-Ata. He took part in exhibitions starting in 1979 and worked at the Department of History of Architecture and Drawing of the Almaty Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering (now the Kazakh State Academy of Architecture).

Karpykov was a well-educated and talented architect, graphic artist, and painter; he was also an inspiring teacher who knew how to pass on his love of architecture to his students. He was a humble man with a surprisingly gentle and kind soul and an artistic temperament. Thanks to this, he could easily adapt to different genres of art and representation. It is no wonder that, in 1989, he gave a talented performance as one of the main characters in Vlyublonnaya Rybka [Little Fish in Love], a film by his brother, Abai Karpykov (an unfortunate typo in the credits listed the artist as Abai instead of Ablai). Karpykov and his wife, Liazzat Maralbaeva, had two sons and two daughters; all of them were taught to draw by their parents. The family twice ran its own gallery, one called Sak and the other Michel Angelo.

Four works from 1980, held in the collection of the Zimmerli Museum, show Karpykov’s love of expressionism, which allowed him to create a painterly score of the image, bypassing the strict certainty of object forms (2000.0037, 2000.0038, and 2000.0039). After that, the artist became fascinated by the style of Vladimir Sterligov, introduced to him by the Almaty architect Rustam Khalfin. However, as Karpykov himself noted in a catalogue from 2007, he felt close to the styles, manners, and trends of many different countries and eras, and did not feel rigorously obliged to follow only one path. [1] Still, he paid tribute to Sterligov’s system. This was not difficult for him because he had been familiar with the Kazakh ornamental tradition since childhood.

Vladimir Sterligov, a student of Kazimir Malevich, visited Kazakhstan twice. First, because of the wave of repression following the murder of Sergei Kirov, from late 1934 to 1938 he served time in Karlag. His second visit was in 1942–45, when after a wartime injury he taught art history and perspective drawing at the Alma-Ata Theater and Art School, illustrated children’s books, and worked for the radio. The time he spent in Kazakhstan was one of the influences on the new style that emerged in his work. There, Sterligov became acquainted with Kazakh ornamental tradition, with its absolute flatness and the bold positive-negative principle of organization of mirrored curvilinear patterns on felt carpets (such as the mosaic syrmak and the figurative tekemet). A dialectical model of the world and its powerful life energy emerges out of the willful interplay of equal elements—either a light pattern within a dark one, or a dark pattern within a light one. After returning to Leningrad in the 1960s, Sterligov continued to work within the suprematist tradition, but he expanded it by incorporating curved lines and organic forms alongside Malevich’s straight lines and rectangles. Sterligov created his famous “cup-cupola” painting system, which was inspired by the observation that all natural forms are curved and tend toward a cup and a cupola—a cup as an open, infinite form and a cupola as a closed, spherical dome. Khalfin visited Sterligov, and upon returning to Alma-Ata, he promoted Sterligov’s ideas and organized apartment exhibitions of drawings by himself, his wife, Lida Blinova, and the architects Karpykov and Boris Iakub.

This led to an interesting state of affairs: in the paintings of the urbanite Khalfin, spots of color are combined in the same manner as in the paintings of former inhabitants of an aul (a Caucasian mountain or desert village) settlement who were not familiar with the Sterligov system (for example, paintings of the classically trained artist Ali Dzhusupov, who hailed from an aul). The reason for this similarity lies in the fact that growing up in an aul allowed these artists to absorb the essence of the ornamental image, which then affected their manner of creating figurative forms and working with patches of color on a canvas. This shared link to aspects of Sterligov’s system, however, had a more fundamental difference: while Almaty painters sought to create images of the visible, known world, Sterligovites wanted to create an ideal combination of the forms of the spiritual realm.

In the summer of 1986, there was an attempt to organize an exhibition of unofficial art in Alma-Ata at the Central Exhibition Hall of the Directorate of Art Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of the Kazakh SSR. The exhibition of works by Blinova, Karpykov, Vladimir Nalimov, Mikhail Rapoport, Khalfin, and Iakub had already been set up. However, an official from the ministry visited the exhibition on the eve of its opening, as was the Soviet custom, and decided that it would be impossible to give the go-ahead to publicize this art, which had not been approved by local authorities. It should be noted that he did not object to the exhibition taking place within the walls of the Union of Architects of Kazakhstan, since four of the six artists were architects. Only friends of the artists got the chance to see this exhibition, but even though it never opened, it was a testament to changing times and circumstances.

A group of gouaches on paper, all in the collection of the artist’s family, show an affinity with Sterligov’s system: Seasons (2001), August (2005), Carnival (2006), Light Breath (2006), and Composition (2009). In the picturesque, multicolor whirls of August we notice, by association, grasses in green, flowers and fruit in red, and ripe wheat and sunlight in yellow. In the center of this splendor, we find the imaginary white face of a woman with bright-red lips. The other four works resemble an applique or a beautiful patchwork blanket (the Kazakh korpe), which any Kazakh woman from an aul would be able to sew from pieces of different fabrics. The difference is that the korpe is like a geometric abstraction, and Karpykov’s work includes human figures, albeit provisionally outlined.

Karpykov would sometimes become captivated by visions of the bygone Kazakh nomadic camps (to many, considered to be a golden age), and he would paint multifigured compositions in a figural pastoral key, which is what we see in the painting Возвращение домой [Homecoming] (2003). On a riverbank in the plains, boys and girls frolic on fast horses while children play. Everyone is well dressed. This was another manifestation of a romanticized relation to the past. People who live on the road dress simply. But here, it seems as though the interiors of yurts decorated with colored, patterned carpets have been opened, all the knots and felt travel bags have been untied, and the most expensive outfits have been taken out. The material and spiritual culture of the people was to be shown in all its glory and richness. Karpykov was not the only artist to romanticize and even idealize nomadic life. Over the decades of Kazakh independence, many such paintings have appeared—romanticism is not only a European genre. In times of transformation and upheaval, a people will turn to the idea of the golden age, which can be difficult, even impossible, to part with.

All the 1980 works by Karpykov in the collection of the Zimmerli Museum are untitled and share the same stylistic features. We can use one of them as an example of how these works are structured: no. 2000.0037 presents a dynamic, colorful space that is both clear and mysterious. If there is a story here, it has been dissolved in the flow of color, in the painterly “batter.” The brightness of the colors and the openness of the brushstrokes—sometimes pastose, sometimes nearly transparent—create the sensation of an event that has not quite transpired, something resembling a troubling dream, one that seems to grow more elusive the more one tries to define it using language (or here, color). The image refuses to submit to either language or the multitude of hues.

The composition is made up of two unequal parts. The larger section on the right is like a receding enfilade of rooms. In the depths of the enfilade, there is a bright spot. The front “room” is wide, while the ones in the back grow more narrow. The walls on the left and right are dotted with bursts of different colors, which communicate powerful emotions, alternating and simultaneous, consistent and chaotic. They are like shadow traces of disappearing events or phenomena. A bright-yellow spot stands out on the left wall, ending with a face at its very top. A face can also be seen on the right wall. The floor consists of light and dark spots, contoured in red, which violates its evenness—it appears to be broken up by obstacles that complicate movement toward the goal. At the top is a kind of arch or vault. In the smaller left part, which somewhat resembles a slit, figures seem to appear. This is a small human space.

This work brings to mind the idea of a light at the end of the tunnel, through which the soul of a departing person goes into the unknown. Here, the meaning of the dark object in front of something light in the distance opens up to us. It is a kind of spiral, pierced with the giant letter V. Perhaps this is the wheel of fate, which allows a person, depending on the kind of life they lived, to reach (or not) the hoped-for light-rest-paradise. And that strange bulging floor represents the mistakes and transgressions along one’s life path.

Bayan Barmankulova

Translated from Russian by Maria P. Vassileva

Notes:

1. Ablai Karpykov, in Ablai Karpykov and Leila Kokubaeva, Ablai Karpykov, Liazzat Maralbaeva and Their Children: Abulkhairkhan, Alua, Sadvakas, Zhanel', exhibition catalogue (Almaty: Michel Angelo gallery, 2007).