Gallery

Contact Chepik

SERGEI CHEPIK           

The Drawings of The House of the Dead    

In January 1979, at the age of 26, Sergei Chepik had already graduated with flying colours from the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts. It was then that he was given access to one of the city's psychiatric asylums by a doctor who worked there. For the artist, it was the start of a unique experience, which was both painful and captivating. For three months, Chepik observed and sketched from life all sorts of individuals who had ended up in this Soviet asylum, where the mildly and severely retarded rubbed shoulders not only with criminals and lunatics, neurotics and schizophrenics, but also with drug addicts, the depressed and the despairing, recovering from suicide attempts.

.

This remarkable experience and his drawings of such overwhelming physical and psychological truth led him years later in 1987 to paint The House of the Dead, a masterpiece that was banned from public viewing in the USSR. It was this which persuaded Chepik to take exile in France in 1988, where the same year the painting was awarded the Grand Prix at the Salon d'Automne. Twenty five years later, the memory of The House of the Dead and the drawings with which he came away are the starting point for this series of 40 original lithographs which Chepik has created in Montmartre.