Vladlen Gavrilchik

Vladlen Gavrilchik was born in 1929 in the Uzbek city of Termez close to the Soviet–Afghan border where his military serviceman father was stationed. After graduating from the Tashkent Suvorov Military School and Leningrad Naval and Border Guard Academy in 1947 and 1951 respectively, Vladlen successively worked as navigator of a border guard cargo carrier in the Soviet Far East, engineer at a military-industrial enterprise, barge skipper, and train attendant. Gavrilchik started painting in his middle age, around the late 1950s: attending amateur art classes at Leningrad’s community centres, he would also teach himself by frequenting museums and libraries or simply associating with artists. Having spent most of his life in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, he died in this city at 88 on 5 December 2017.

Gavrilchik’s works invite comparisons with Naïve Art or Primitivism: a conscious choice made after the artist had adequately perfected his painting skills. His simplicity is thus illusory. By romanticising a portrait, finding poetry in a squalid scenery or turning the Soviet myth into a semblance of a lubok print, he ironically reimagines human aspiration for the refined world of beauty. To a certain extent, the artist’s own personality epitomised this aspiration, as he was prolific not only in painting and drawing, but also in photography, object-making, and even poetry. In addition to canvases and drawings, in his later years Vladlen Gavrilchik created assemblages under the self-coined term of ‘ship objects,’ in equal measure continuing the tradition of ship modelling and upholding the sculptural legacy of the avant-garde.