This is the official site of the Russian-born artist Sergei Chepik
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on the photos to have full image
Since leaving the former Soviet Union in 1988, Sergei
Chepik has firmly established himself as one of the leading living Russian artists. Three
months after taking up exile in Paris, his first major masterpiece, The House of The Dead (1987)
won the Gold Medal at the Salon d'Automne. The following year, The
Tree (1982-1984) was awarded the Monaco City Award. Since, critics have
hailed him as "a searing visionary" and "a genius", and Baroness
Margaret Thatcher and Rudolf Nureyev (1991-1993) have agreed to pose for him.
The force of many of his paintings is unrivalled by any other artist alive today. Works
such as The Foreign Towns (Loneliness)
(1993) or Golgotha (1996) provoke an
unforgettable emotional reaction in the onlooker. His vision of the world is quite
uncompromising. He has the courage to confront reality head-on and endows his work with
both immense truth and powerful sense of drama. Yet, all is not bleak in his universe. For
Chepik, the master technician, is capable of great variety and can pass with great ease
from a work of social critique to delicately pretty watercolours of Provence or Italy,
depictions of a Russian or Venitian carnival which simply
burst out with colour, and self-portraits which can embrace both the figurative and
abstract in one painting.
Quite naturally, Russia has proved
to be one of his greater sources of inspiration. In the past he has dealt with subjects
such as Petrushka(1984-1986), The House of the Dead (1987), The Foundation of Saint-Petersburg
(1989), Ivan the Terrible (1990), Memories (1989). Since the beginning of
the Nineties, he has regularly come back to the theme of the Troika, evoked by Gogol at
the end of the Dead Souls. It poses the question: "Just where is Russia
heading?" Not surprisingly, each version from Troika
(1991) is invariably chaotic and torturous. And each new painting on Russia, Red Square (1993-1994), Chechnya (1997), and his last
masterpiece The Cross of Russia
(1999) offers a tragic but almost inevitable conclusion: the imminent destruction of
Chepik's motherland.
