Nikolai Polissky, the Russian artist, by the Lighthouse on the river Ugra in the village of the Nikola-Lenivets in the Kaluga region south of Moscow. Nikola-Lenivets, about a four bumpy hour’s drive south of Moscow in the Kaluga region, has inspired the land-art creations of Nikolai Polissky, and has become both a magnet for Russian contemporary artists and a name…
Nikolay Vladimirovich Polissky was born in Moscow on January 5th, 1957. In 1982 he graduated from the Mukhina Higher School of Industrial Design in Leningrad, where he studied at the Ceramics Department. He was a member of the Mitki group of artists, with whom he participated in exhibitions in many cities all over the world. The Mitki are a group…
Artist Nikolay Polissky, who moved to the village of Nikola-Lenivets in Kaluzhskaya Region in 1989 and creates art objects in collaboration with local residents and in unity with a magnificent landscape, would seem to be an ideal embodiment of the view, now found only on the pages of Soviet school textbooks, that the art of Russian artists, writers, composers, and…
Ivan Kramskoy, the architect whose pen was rather more accurate than his brush, wrote of the great Russian landscape painter Ivan Shishkin: "Shishkin is the milestone of the Russian landscape". What he meant was that Russian landscape painting prior to Shishkin and after him were two completely different art forms. Before Shishkin the landscape was a respectable picture that hung…
Nikolai Polissky was born in 1957 and first trained in ceramics in St Petersburg, becoming one of the group of Mitki artists there. The movement named after the artist Dmitry Shagin, has been described as 'an ironic hybrid of Tolstoyism and hippy philosophy.' It set the mood for Nikolai when he moved to the village Nikola-Lenivets, some 200 kilometers west…
At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much to Nikola-Lenivets. Perched on a scenic outcropping over a bend in the Ugra river, it has a clump of well-tended dachas, some ancient Slavic burial mounds and a 19th-century church. The village hasn't seen much action since the 13th century, when Tatar troops approached the Ugra, sized up the Russians assembled…
Russian land-artist Polissky works with peasants in the countryside to build huge structures and hand-crafted sculptures that have drawn the attention of the Kremlin and Russia's elite. Comparing Russia to Britain is always a tricky feat, but a recent article by Vladislav Surkov in the Moscow-based art magazine Artchronika is the equivalent of Alistair Campbell writing for Frieze about Andy…
