• Nikolay Polissky
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Video
  • Profile
  • Publications

    Profile Publications
    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…
    Interview Publications
    What is the connection between land art and architecture? Land art as art is, I think, something altogether ancient. It's something from the earth, something from our ancestors, which means that it died a long time ago. For us it is a new and unfamiliar spectacle. Of course, you can call it a kolkhoz [collective farm], but then no one…
    General Publications
    selpo-photo-by-alexey-naroditskiy_21055723036_o
    Russian artist Nikolay Polissky has completed yet another of his impressive, handcrafted installations. Located in Zvizzhi Village, in the Ugra…
    selpo-photo-by-alexey-naroditskiy_20893898280_o
    Set within the landscape of Ugra National Park, artist Nikolay Polissky has completed the sculptural ‘selpo pavilion’ in the rural…
    selpo-photo-by-alexey-naroditskiy_21055723036_o
    Russian artist Nikolay Polissky has transformed a dilapidated building in the village of Zvizzhi into a pavilion covered in pieces…
    ...That said, my personal vote goes to Nikolai Polissky’s wood-rendered take on the Large Hadron Collider. Polissky lives and works…
    NIKOLA-LENIVETS, Russia — In this dying village, people don't carve out a living. They scrape it with their nails from…