Shelkovsky, Igor
Igor Shelkovsky was born in Orenburg on the Ural River, 900 miles south-east from Moscow, in 1937. His was brought up by his grandmother in Moscow after both of his parents were sent to the GULAG. Igor started to draw very early and went to the art studio at Central House of Railwaymen Children from the age of 10. He enrolled at the theatre design faculty of the Moscow Regional Art Pedagogical School of Fine Arts in memory of the 1905 uprising in 1954 where the faculty head was Viktor Shestakov (1898-1957), a former artistic director of the famous Meyerhold Theatre.
In 1957 Shelkovsky saw contemporary American and European art during the 6th World Festival of Youth in Moscow which had a great impact on his future style. After his graduation in 1959, he worked in various publishing houses and theatres as a designer and became an icon restorer at the Moscow Kremlin in 1962. In the 1960s he became part of the Moscow circle of unofficial artists and had a personal show at the Central House of Workers of Art in Moscow in 1969.
Shelkovsky had his studio and started to make abstract geometric sculptures from wood, found objects and other materials in 1971 and the art collector George Costakis (1913-1990) acquired his works. He met and became friends with members of the Moscow conceptualists Sretensky Boulevard Group in the mid-1970s.
With the help of Tolstoy Foundation Igor emigrated to France in 1976. He managed to bring some of his sculptures with him one of which was immediately purchased by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. From 1979 to 1986 Shelkovsky published the A-YA magazine, an underground art review which became a virtual “who is who” of the non-conformist art in the Soviet Union for years to come. He opened a studio in Élancourt, not far from Versailles, where he continued to paint and make his abstract sculptures from wood and metal and to exhibit with many commercial galleries for the next 30 years.
Shelkovsky had his major retrospectives in France in 1997 and 2000, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow in 2009, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and the Sate Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 2017. His works are present in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Ludwig Museum in Vienne, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey, USA, the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow and other important public and private collections.
