Kudryashov, Oleg
Oleg Kudryashov was born in Moscow in 1932. He started to draw before he could read at the age of three or four encouraged by his grandmother who bought him his first pencil, paints and a brush. His father initially did not approve of his son’s hobby but later gave Oleg a topographic ruler which he used to paint his first “Suprematist” composition at the age of ten.
His mother enrolled him in the art club at the Moscow City House of Pioneers and Little Octobrists (MGDPiO) known as Gordom or “the House on Stopani” and he went there three times a week in the 1940s. When Kudryashov took his works to Sergei Merkurov ( 1881-1952), a famous sculptor and the director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in 1944-1949 he thought that Oleg drew beautifully and advised him “not to listen to anyone and continue as you are”. He went to the Tretyakov Gallery to see Russian paintings and icons and learnt about dry-point from a book called “Engraving technique” and prints by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and other Old Masters from art albums.
n 1950 Oleg attended the evening classes at the Krasnaya Presnaya Art School situated in Gagarin Mansion on Bolshaya Sadovaya where one of his teachers was Georgy Ryazhsky (1895-1952), a pupil of Anna Golubkina (1864-1927) and Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and studied at the All-Union Cartoon Studio in 1956-1958. Kudryashov’s interest in printmaking was growing and he experimented with woodblocks, linocuts, etchings with dry-point remaining his favourite.
In the 1960s he was a mature master-printmaker and installed his first printing press at home in 1967. Oleg became a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and regularly participated in its annual exhibitions from 1961. HisHis works were bought by Pushkin Fine Art Museum and were shown at Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia in 1965, Venice Biennale in 1966, Russian Art from Antiquity to Present Show in Paris in 1967, Soviet Graphic Art in Kiel, Germany in 1971 and International Biennale in Barcelona, Spain in 1972.
Kudryashov knew Moscow non-conformist artists but neither took part in any of the unofficial art exhibitions nor worked for the state publishing houses or other enterprises as most of them did. In 1974 he and his family moved to London where he would live and work for the next 25 years. Upon his arrival, Oleg’s talent was immediately recognised and he received strong support from Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE (1900-1984), an ardent art collector and promoter, and David Brown (1925-2002), the Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate, two of the leading figures of the British art world of the time. His mono-prints benefited from the use of colour and acquired pictorial character.
Kudryashov started to work with commercial galleries in England, Germany, France, the USA and Switzerland. He had his solo exhibitions at the Acme Gallery, London in 1976, Riverside Studio, London in 1982, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow in 1992, the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, the USA in 1997, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow in 1999, the Kreeger Museum, Washington, DC (together with William Kentridge) in 2009, the Bermondsey Project Space, London in 2012, the Municipal Art Gallery in Trieste, Italy in 2015, the Russian Culture Centre, London in 2018.
Oleg Kudrayshov was awarded the Russian State Award in Art in 2001 and his first monograph by Christina Lodder, Edward Lucie-Smith, Igor Golomstock and Sergei Reviakin was published in London in 2018. His works are present in the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Arts Council of England Collection in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri in the USA, the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Pushkin Fine Art Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in Russia.
