We are pleased to announce that the

Mead Art Museum at Amherst College has acquired two early works by Boris Chetkov

There Will Be Light

Boris Alexandrovich Chetkov (1926-2010)

Oil on Board,    1959,    12" x 20" (30 cm x 50 cm)

Consider the Soviet Union in the 1959 - Nikita Khrushchev, the Iron Curtain, the height of the cold war and a repressive totalitarian regime. Art was governed by and produced strictly for the State to espouse the ‘virtues’ of the Soviet system. Artwork created outside these parameters was a violation of the law.  

It was in this environment that the young artist, Boris Chetkov, a survivor of the gulag and WWII, set forth on his own defiant quest, channeling his psychic energy into a stream of highly emotive, abstract action paintings full of originality, bravado, and color, creating an extraordinary cryptic narrative on the world around him.

Composition

Boris Alexandrovich Chetkov (1926-2010)

Oil on Panel,    1970,    20" x 17" (50cm x 43cm)

Boris Chetkov, the stand-alone pioneer of Abstract Expressionism in Russia, living in isolation behind a cultural iron curtain, somehow came to the same conclusions as his celebrated western contemporaries, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston and Helen Frankenthaler, among others.