Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Oleg Kudryashov, Two-Hand Saw, 1979
drypoint construction
72 x 24 in.

Oleg Kudryashov was born in Moscow in 1932. He attended the Moscow State Art Studios in 1942-47 and the Moscow Art School in 1950-51. In 1974 he emigrated to London, where he has lived ever since. Before his departure from the Soviet Union, he destroyed thousands of works he had created. Kudryashov has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, including shows at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. His work is included in the collections of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Kudryashov works primarily in the medium of drypoint etching, a technique favored by the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. The artist draws expansively with a burin, a print-making tool, directly onto a zinc plate. He then prints these "drawings" on paper on which he has already worked in a free-form style with a variety of media, including gouache, watercolor, and charcoal. In the late 1970s he began to cut up his work and reconstruct the elements, creating three0dimensional artworks that blur the lines between drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. The combination of hard-edged geometric forms with painterly abstraction points to the influence of early-twentieth-century Russian Constructivism and Cubism, as well as the Abstract Expressionism of New York in the 1950s. Among the recurring references in his work is a broken saw, which has been said to find its roots in childhood experiences in the freezing Russian winters.