YOURI JARKIKH

Youri Jarkikh (1938), along with Alexander Arefyev and Yevgeny Rukhin, is among the legendary Leningrad (St. Peterburg) nonconformists of the 1970s: they organized resonant exhibitions, stood at the origins of the “Gazanevskaya culture” and were the spokesmen of protest sentiments in that historical period, when it was no longer safe ...

More than half of his 84 years, Jarkikh has lived in exile. His works are in collections of the best museums in the world, including the Pompidou Center, and the number of his exhibitions in the West exceeds a hundred. In the USSR, he did not have even a small part of such exhibition opportunities.

 

Youri Jarkikh was born in Krasnodar Krai, Kuban, Russia. At the age of 20, he left home and moved to Leningrad, where he graduated first from the Maritime School and then, in 1967, from the Leningrad V. Mukhina Higher School of Arts and Crafts. From his first works he showed himself to be a bright and original artist. In the 1970s Jarkikh was one of the leaders of the informal art scene in Leningrad and Moscow. He is one of the first to exhibit "underground art".

He was one of the main organizers of the first exhibitions of "underground" art (in 1974 at the V. Gaza Cultural Centre in Leningrad and in 1975 at the "Nevsky" Cultural Centre). In 1974 he participated in the famous Moscow „Bulldozer“ exhibition. At the end of 1975, on his initiative, the Association of Experimental Exhibitions was founded, uniting artists-nonconformists. In the second half of the 1970s, Jarkikh emigrated to Germany to escape persecution by the authorities, and then to France, where he still lives and works. He has participated in more than 160 solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Jarkikh`s highly original art, with its individual language, is strongly influenced by Russian avant-garde art and German expressionism.