Oleg Lang

Oleg Lang was born in 1950 in Novomoskovsk, Tula Oblast. Having moved to Moscow, he studied at the School of Painting of the Vasily Surikov Moscow State Institute of Art. In 2010, Lang was elected Associate Member of the Russian Academy of Arts. The artist died in Moscow in 2013.

A prominent contemporary Russian artist, Oleg Lang was one of the most important representatives of the generation that entered the art scene at the decline of the Soviet era, in the 1980s. Lang broadened the scope of the contemporary Russian painting practice by devising his own recognisable artistic language evocative of Expressionism and the Neue Wilde. Over the span of 25 years, his art meaningfully evolved from abstraction to figurative expression. The artist was featured in 500 Artists. Encyclopaedia of the Russian 20th-Century Painting. Lang’s painting style, despite its artistic conventionality, deals not with the metaphysical, but with real life. His compositional arrangements are distinct in their enrapturing freedom, witty play of textures, vibrant colour spots, and self-contained delineation of space. The artist’s spatial metaphors are as unexpected as original rhymes, while the sheer joy of creativity verges on the tragic.