China Millennium Monument Museum and Mountain Art Foundation proudly presented Two Contemporary Russian Masters. The works are from the Soviet Masters, A. A. Milnikov and Tahir Salahov. There are more than 120 works of Oil paintings and skeches shown in the exhibition.
In 1957, Salakhov participated in the National Art Exhibition of Soviet Union with his graduation oil painting Off Shift, the works that established his fame. The painting described men and women workers walking on the trestle after a night of tense working in the deep-sea oil well. Salakhov went back to his hometown Baku after graduation from Surikov Art Institute, finding great attraction towards the national and cultural tradition from the constructors and workers in Baku, the oil industry center. From the end of 1950s to 1960s, he created oil paintings including Tank Can in the Morning, Oil Reservoir, Oilmen, Emergency Repairmen, etc. He was not satisfied with describing the commonplace in daily life any more, and turned to express the nature and the serious side of life. Correspondingly, he added elements of strong contrast into the painting and started to focus on the grand and monumental composition, simple and generalized painting language as well as the rigorous sense of beauty. In the painting circles of Soviet Union of that period, he was generally considered as the representative of rigorous painting school.
His representative work in 1970s should be Portrait of Composer Shostakovich, which expressed vividly the complicated inner world of the master with a life full of vicissitudes.
After 1980s, he started to use the modern composition method to present the landscape in a clear and orderly way, with his brushstrokes rough, broad and firm and colors calm and collected, showing sense of strength and power. Stage designing is important in his art career too.
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