Oil painting Portrait of a naked girl Valentin Dmitrievich Khrushch

№Verns 781


*** ABOUT THIS PAINTING ***
* TITLE: "Portrait of a naked girl"
* ARTISTS: Valentin Dmitrievich Khrushch
* SIZE: 31x46 cm/'12.20x18.11 inches'
* MEDIUM: oil, plywood
* HAND PAINTED: Original painting from our collection
* CONDITION: we tried to convey the maximum information with the help of photos about this product

About the artist: Born on January 24, 1943 in the Peresyp microdistrict of occupied Odessa [3]. His father was a trawler captain, his mother died when Valentin was seven months old. From childhood he was raised by his grandmother, who instilled in him a love of art. She took him to the apartments of her friends, where the future artist first got acquainted with the works of Odessa classics, such as Teofil Fraerman, Pyotr Nilus, Kyriak Kostandi, Tit Dvornikov - at that time they were in private collections, not in museums [4].

He received his primary art education at the Odessa art school [5]. In the 1950s, he studied at the Odessa Art School (teachers Zaitsev, Egorov, Pavlyuk, Fraerman) [3], and was later expelled for "leftist" views [6]. Since 1958 he exhibited annually at regional exhibitions in Odessa [7].

In 1967, the famous exhibition "Sychik + Khrushchik" was held, organized by artists Valentin Khrushch and Stanislav Sychev on the fence of the Odessa Opera House, which became the starting point for "Odessa nonconformism" and later received the name "Fence Exhibition". The action lasted only three hours [8]. Information about this project went far beyond Odessa, undoubtedly serving as an example for Moscow exhibitions, in particular, the "Bulldozer Exhibition" in Moscow, held in 1974 [9]. The photographs of Mikhail Rybak have survived [10]. The artists were supported by the editorial staff of the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Iskra", editor Igor Belenkov, writer Arkady Lvov, journalists Alexei Ivanov and Yevgeny Golubovsky [11] [9], who organized the artist's first solo exhibition in the hall of the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Iskra" "[12].

Since the 1970s, Valentin Khrushch has been actively involved in organizing the first "apartment exhibitions" in Odessa [9], which were held every week in the studio apartments of artists Oleg Sokolov, Alexander Anufriev and Margarita Zharkova, Viktor Marinyuk and Lyudmila Yastreb, as well as in an apartment collector Vladimir Asriev, located between the offices of the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs [13]. During this period, the name of Valentin Khrushch, as well as his colleagues in "Odessa nonconformism" A. Anufriev, V. Strelnikov, L. Yastreb, V. Marinyuk, S. Sychev, V. Basants began to appear in foreign catalogs and exhibition expositions [14 ][15]. In 1979 he took part in the unofficial exhibition "Contemporary Art from Ukraine" (Munich-London-Paris-New York) [16].

Valentin Khrushch has always been at the forefront of artistic trends, closely communicated with the young generation of Odessa conceptual artists and organized events, although he himself never called them that or documented. Among the most famous is the "exhibition for birds", which is a picture hung by the artist on trees, birds were meant as spectators. The second is similar - "Exhibition for the Sea", in which the artist placed his abstract painting on the beach wall, photographed and left [4].

In 1982, Valentin Khrushch moved from Odessa to Moscow [17]. In 1991, his personal exhibition took place at the Central House of Artists [18].

Valentin Khrushch spent his last years in the town of Kimry, Tver region, where he died of cancer on January 24, 2005 [17]. He was buried there in the fence of the St. Nicholas Church [19].