SERGEI CHEPIK

        This is the official site of the Russian-born artist Sergei Chepik

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For twenty years, Franco-Russian painter Sergei Chepik was hailed by the press as a ‘searing visionary’, and ‘one of Russia's greatest living painters ’. Represented in important British, Russian, French and American collections, this 'unclassifiable' artist, painted portraits of Rudolf Nureyev and Margaret Thatcher. He created a monumental series of four canvases – The Way, the Truth and the Life (2002-2004) for St Paul's Cathedral in London, which were inaugurated in January 2005. He lived and worked in Paris from 1988 until his premature death in November 2008, on the feast of the Dedication of Saint Peters’ and Saint Paul’s Basilicas

Born in Kiev in 1953 to an artist father and sculptress mother, Sergei Chepik grew up in a family anxious to preserve the values and culture of pre-1917 Russia, and started painting at the age of five. Admitted to the prestigious Repin Institut in Leningrad (the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts), he graduated brilliantly in 1978 and began immediately to work on his first paintings. He travelled across Russia, perfecting his technique in classes held by the Academician Andrey Mylnikov. Mylnikov was a pupil of Igor Grabar who was, together with Alexander Benois, one of the theorists of the prestigious World of Art movement, led by Sergey Diaghilev. Chepik's long years of apprenticeship with demanding and open-minded masters instilled in him a lasting legacy of professionalism, a taste for excellence and a deep respect for the artistic heritage of centuries past.

Chepik's masterpiece The House of The Dead, painted in 1987 and banned from public display in the USSR, determined his voluntary departure to France, where the painting won the Grand Prix at the 1988 Salon d'Automne. In the following year, his painting The Tree won the Monaco City Award. In 1990, Chepik held his first solo retrospective in London, at the Roy Miles Gallery, enjoying unprecedented acclaim. Chepik has exhibited annually in London ever since - first with the Roy Miles Gallery, and, from 1997, with the Catto Gallery. He also exhibited in Paris, having presented a retrospective at the Espace Pierre Cardin in 2004, and in Milan, where a retrospective of his religious paintings was held in 2008. This was then repeated in the famous church of Auvers-sur-Oise in 2010.

Chepik was a master of all mediums, from watercolour and oil to etching, ceramics and sculpture. He mastered all genres, from portraiture – at which he excelled – to composition - his genre of choice, via landscape and still-life. He liked to measure himself against the great masters of the past and refused the too easy temptation of the tabula rasa - resisting the predominant currents of materialistic ideology and narcissistic subjectivity that characterises much of Contemporary Art. Resolutely figurative, Chepik was faithful to his own artistic calling throughout his life and was never swayed by the fashion of the times.

His wide-ranging themes were varied, but constituted a highly distinctive, immediately recognisable visual world. There are the vast historiosophical compositions about Russia, in which Chepik – in canvas after canvas – ceaselessly questioned and explored the tragic destiny of his native country, as well as his many fantasmagorical and philosophical compositions. There are the monumental religious paintings which occupied a privileged place for this orthodox Christian painter. And there are scenes, too, from his daily life in Montmartre and his many journeys throughout Europe : Paris and the chimeras of Notre-Dame; Venice and its Carnival ; Arles and its corridas, (which he passionnately attended since 1994); the world of circuses and entertainers, boxing rings, cabarets, and backstage at the Moulin Rouge – all unmistakably Chepik. Marie-Aude Albert, 2013.