Gennadii Gogoliuk was born in Rostov Oblast, Russia in 1960 and studied at the Lugansk School of Art in the Ukraine. He worked for several years at the The Mariinskii Theatre (now the Kirov) as a scene painter before winning a place to study Fine Art at the Leningrad Academy of Art in 1983. With the advent of perestroika and the lifting of censorship, Gogoliuk became increasingly aware of international avant garde art and his early experimental work increasingly brought him into conflict with the Academy which remained rigidly traditional in its teaching methods. Several times expelled from the Academy’s studios, he was eventually permitted to present a diploma piece allowing him to graduate in 1990. Apart from this one diploma work he had largely abandoned painting in favour of performance art, working alongside the radical collectives Tut I Tam and Gruppa Rabochego Deistviia and exhibiting in Russia (the Russian Museum, St Petersburg 1995) Denmark, Finland and Germany (Kunstforum, Bonn, 1992 and Heimatmuseum, Burgeln 1993). In 1998 Gogoliuk moved to Edinburgh and began to paint once more seeing his painting as being inextricably linked to his work as a performance artist and through it freed from his academic training. - John Martin

When I go into the studio, it always seems to me that I am meeting my paintings for the first time, like strangers. They don’t recognise me, or at least they pretend not to. So I always put off the encounter, I have a coffee, a cigarette, then another coffee. I try to think of a new strategy, which will enable me to make my entrance inoffensively, harmlessly, as if I wasn’t even there. I light a candle, say a prayer, as if over the coffin of somebody who has died. Then I see them come back. I don’t know who they are. Maybe they are the same people that I spoke with yesterday or before that. They surround me, slowly, I can hear them breathing, almost in my ear. I always begin with a new canvas, one which has been prepared for a new image, and I listen, so that I can hear what the canvas wants, what it is that needs to be drawn. That’s the most difficult moment. Then my hand automatically traces a line or takes a particular colour. The most important thing at this point is to deceive your own inner critic, to deceive your head. That’s why at this point you need to use the technique of the left hand, of not knowing, of being taken by surprise. Your head falls from your shoulders as if it had been chopped off by a Cossack’s sword. And then everything flows, and you are like a headless horseman, tied onto your horse, and you just move about the picture, as if nothing mattered. - Gennadii Gogoliuk

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