Rukhin, Evgeny
Evgeny Rukhin was born in Saratov, a town on the Volga River, 500 miles south-east from Moscow, in 1943. He started to paint at the age of twenty when he was a student at the Geological Prospecting faculty of the Leningrad State University in 1961-1966. Evgeny was a vocational student at the Mukhin Higher School of Industrial Art in Leningrad in 1964-1965 and studied European art from illustrations in books and magazines.
Rukhin admired American pop-art and started a correspondence with James Rosenquist (1933–2017) who visited Evgeny’s studio and dedicated his work “Whipped Butter for Eugene Ruchin” to him in 1965. He had several personal exhibitions in cinemas in Leningrad and Betty Parson’s Gallery in New York in 1966. Rukhin met Vladimir Nemukhin (1925-2016) who became his mentor and friend and Oscar Rabin (1928-2018) and started to exhibit with the unofficial artists in Moscow from the end of the 1960s.
Evgeny worked with oil and synthetic tempera oils moving to abstraction and using mixed techniques and found objects. His works addressed the Russian past and history, everyday life and religious feelings of ordinary citizens. Rukhin had his solo exhibition in the yard of Edmund and Nina Stevens house in Moscow in 1970. He continued to exhibit prolifically in Russia and abroad and was one of the organizers of the First Autumn Open Air Exhibition, or the Bulldozer Exhibition and the Second Autumn Open Air Exhibition in Izmaylovsky Park in Moscow in 1974.
Evgeny Rukhin tragically died during the fire in his studio which cause was never established. His works are present at the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Fine Art Museum in Moscow, the State Russian Museum and the New Museum in Saint Petersburg, at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey, USA and other important museums and private collections in Russia and abroad.
