Welcome to the brand new Arthive! Discover a full list of new features here.

Nikolai
Alekseevich Rothko

Russia • born in 1944

Biography and information

Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR (Russia) since 1977. Graphic artist. Honored Artist of the Russian Federation (2003).

Born in 1944 in the village. Abagur-Forest Kemerovo region. In 1968 he graduated from the Irkutsk Art College. Participant of exhibitions since 1969. In 1976 he was awarded the Lenin Komsomol Prize and a diploma of the I degree of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and the Union of Artists of the USSR. Admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1977. He lived and worked in Novokuznetsk and Moscow. Currently lives in Novokuznetsk.

 

Nikolai Rothko never strove for spectacularity, intuitively protecting himself from the pressure of plots and compositional structures that had developed in Soviet art. One way or another, Rothko managed to find an independent path in art. In most cases, in the experimental series of the artist it is difficult to distinguish a work that reflects the final conscious result. At the same time, the painter allows the viewer to participate in the formation of a figurative metaphor, the knowledge of its meanings. The patterns of spatial and color being turned by the artist into symbolic signs of subject forms, in which a living fantasy and "primacy" were realized. It is thought, first of all, that is why Rothko, whose first works appeared back in the late 60s, was not destined to enter into critical reviews of the exhibitions. However, there was another reason for this. Already then, the different nature of his pictorial plasticity, rhythms, and searches for effective expressiveness made itself felt. In many of his paintings, Rothko superimposes or closely joins color planes, textured formations and the associated graphic forms that create high tension, now dramatic, sometimes festive, then contrastingly changeable.

Uses Nikolai Rothko and other means of artistic description of space. Often, the leading role is given to them by volume-rhythmic structures that are close in their parameters to sculpture. The artist has also been attracted in recent years by the search for the luminosity of the picture. Light also serves to increase tension, to intervene in the saturated existence of the picturesque texture, increasing the spiritual expression of images.

Nikolai Rothko acquired his plastic style gradually. And all the stages of the formation of Nikolai Rothko as an artist and the development of his own style are inseparable from the land on which he was formed. Homeland: the village of Abagur, Kemerovo region, taiga. The vastness of the vastness and at the same time the abandonment seemed to be beyond the farthest reaches of the world. The addiction to drawing as an inexplicable impulse appeared there. Further, he was lucky with the school: Nikolai studied in Irkutsk, where he received “craft skills” with a rather relaxed style of writing and a thoughtful attitude to the spatial construction of compositions. In the beginning of the 70s, the experience of an informal school in Moscow and the metropolitan area was followed by invaluable importance - study in the studio of Evgeny Abramovich Rosenblum. It is here that in parallel with the study of the actual artistic process of the West, the possibility of realizing art, which is now understood as a way of gaining personal, personal freedom, first appears. At the same time, during this period, not so much training as self-acquisition takes place and close communication with an older friend, also in many ways a mentor, is Evgeny Strulev, one of the best artists of the generation of the seventies.

And already after returning to Novokuznetsk, Rothko suddenly chose the path of monumental ceramics, which was quite in his manner of self-testing, another long stage on the way to himself. And this time was not in vain. The lesson for his easel creativity was the emphasized three-dimensionality of figures. Such are the first pictorial series of Nikolai Rothko - “Music”, “Magi”.

Rothko’s paints go through a cycle similar to the creation of Old Russian frescoes. The color system of some of his works in characteristic plasticity combines color schemes naturally and organically, like a beautiful plant generated by nature. From the method of painting objects, the color acquires a self-valuable sound, forming a new unity, a kind of mysterious chorale, in which the burning of each individual paint does not overshadow, but strengthens the neighboring one. That color is the dominant connecting its most diverse plastic searches. In short, Rothko's color is an axiom.