Pavel Nikonov

On the eve of his 90th birthday, which will be marked in 2020 by a major exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, Pavel Nikonov (born 1930) looks back on nearly 70 years of his activity as an artist. From his involvement in crucial cultural events of the 1960s, including the confrontation with Khrushchev around the legendary 1962 Manezh exhibition “30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists”, his participation in the progressive “Nine” group and his pioneering development of the “Severe Style”, through to the new artistic directions that followed his choice in the 1970s to spend much of his time in the village of Aleksino on the Volga, Nikonov has never ceased his creative explorations. He continues to move forward today in the most productive sense, a deeply original expressionist artist working within the traditions of figurative art.