Vladimir Nemukhin (Владимир Немухин, 1925–2016) was one of the central figures of postwar Soviet unofficial art and a core member of the Lianozovo group, the circle of nonconformist artists and poets that gathered around Oscar Rabin outside Moscow from the mid-1950s.
The card table
Nemukhin studied in the 1940s under Petr Sokolov, a former assistant to Kazimir Malevich, an apprenticeship that shaped his lifelong commitment to abstraction. From 1956 he was part of the Lianozovo circle that rejected Socialist Realism. He is known internationally for the recurring motif of playing cards — his “Card Solitaires” (Карточные пасьянсы), begun in the mid-1960s, are collages and assemblages that turn the card table into a meditation on chance and composition.
Notable works
- The Card Table No. 3 (1966)
- Solitaire “Do Not Tilt” (Пасьянс «Не кантовать», 1971)
- Playing Cards (Игральные карты, 1988)
- The continuing “Card Solitaires” series, from the mid-1960s onward
Life and recognition
Nemukhin took part in the 1974 open-air exhibition near Moscow that the authorities razed with bulldozers — the Bulldozer Exhibition — and afterwards helped negotiate the officially tolerated Gorkom painting section. He lived in Germany through the 1990s and returned to Moscow around 2005. In 2008 he was elected an Honorary Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts.
Exhibitions and collections
His work is held by the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, whose Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection holds roughly one hundred of his pieces.