OLEG TSELKOV (RUSSIAN B. 1934)
Face with Paperclip, 1980
oil on canvas
50.5 x 73 cm (19 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.)
signed, titled and dated on verso; with an additional gifting inscription "For Dear Mark Tenenbaum 8 June 1982”

PROVENANCE
Macdougall's, London, December 1, 2010, Lot 520

The authenicity of this painting has been confirmed by the artist.

LOT NOTES:
As the art critic Andre Parinaud so astutely observed in 1982: “The Douanier Rousseau of 1982 could perhaps be called Oleg Tselkov. In the architecture of his work one can perceive a monumental dynamism, that primitive force which is the artless soul of painting. His gigantic silhouettes… his cluster of faces, his distortions, are ruled by a gigantic impulse which goes beyond all equilibrium, but only to give more truth and intensity to life. Whilst his Goulag figures, his pins that pierce the flesh, are signs of the tragedy of time. The imaginary enchantment… has given way to dark (yet comic) humor of the nail, the key, the clip, which leave laughable but plastic mark on the canvas. His uniformly coloured paintings in green, red, pink, blue have an infernal blandness of shading and the stroke of his brush, the faultless precision of a guillotine. Remember his name.” Quoted in Le Grand Monografie, Pittori d’Oggi: Tselkov, (Milan: Fabbri Editoru, 1988), p. 198.